Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Testing wastewater to help detect Covid-19”.
Katya MONIZ, Our goal in this initiative is to establish and validate a wastewater-based system to monitor COVID-19 on campus., And this is complementary to all the medical testing. That’S being done here at MIT. Medical. Wastewater is incredibly rich source of information about public health.. A lot of pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, are excreted in stool and are detectable in wastewater at very, very low levels..
So, for instance, wastewater reflects everyone who is infected and shedding the virus. Not just people who are symptomatic., It can actually be a leading indicator of what’s detected in the clinic because there’s no lag between when the person gets the virus and starts shedding and when they feel sick enough to go to their doctor and maybe get access to A clinical test., CARLO FANONE, The apparatus we use and the system we’re using is very simple.. We modify our sanitary piping and specifically the clean-out section, and we insert a gripper plug.. We then create a test port out of that modification, and we put pick-up tubing inside the sanitary line to collect the samples used for testing. The device that collects those samples contains a motor, a pump and a timer and containers.. The samples that we do not use get pumped back through the exact same line back into the sanitary line., DAMON, BAPTISTA, MIT’s, Environment, Health and Safety Office is an integrated office of safety professionals from a wide variety of disciplines..
When we look at certain things for this project, one of the things is what kind of personal protective equipment will the people wear. Some examples are safety, glasses and gloves. For this project in particular, we looked at some of the sampling protocols., So the technicians will come To the site, every day. They open up this box. Inside there is a container with the samples.. They withdraw a small amount of that sample..
They put it into a collection tube.. They close that tube tightly.. They put some plastic wrap on it called parafilm to avoid any leaks.. They put that in a bag..
They put that in a cooler that gets delivered to the lab for processing. AMY XIAO. The first thing we do is we inactivate the wastewater to make sure that everyone in the lab is safe.. Next, we enrich for the viral particles inside the wastewater., And then we break the viral particles open to get their RNA..
Then, after that, it’s basically the same thing as the CDC swab test, where we do a PCR., And that will tell us if the virus is in the wastewater and if so, how many viruses were in there., KATYA MONIZ. So what this is going to look like for the fall semester is we’re rolling this program out in seven buildings across campus, and we are collecting samples around the clock. So to ensure that this wastewater-based method is effective, we will validate our results against anonymized, fully de-identified Data from MIT Medical.
We’re only looking at COVID-19. We’re not using wastewater to detect anything else.. There is no personally identifiable information that we’re going to derive from this wastewater., So our hope is to establish a wastewater-based system that will complement our medical efforts right now to track COVID-19 in the current pandemic, but also be something that we can have as a platform.
In the future to track other diseases, so, for instance, influenza or norovirus or other health concerns in the MIT community. CARLO FANONE. This has been an amazing collaboration across many groups and departments here at MIT and we’re very grateful for everybody’s support., [, MUSIC PLAYING ] .