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PCR and rapid tests aren't the only places where evidence of SARS-COV-2, commonly known as COVID-19, shows up. The virus that causes COVID-19 also turns up in a city's wastewater. Because of that, wastewater has become a powerful tool to give scientists early glimpses into when infections are peaking. "Wastewater actually tells us a really great story," said Amanda Wegner, communications and public affairs director at the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District. "What we've learned with viruses is that people shed the virus. When they use the bathroom, that enters the wastewater stream." According to the Centers for Disease Control and...

‘It tastes like a nice, crisp, Kölsch style ale. You'd have no idea the source of the water’ The thought of drinking wastewater is pretty unsavoury, right? But that’s exactly what one American brewery is encouraging people to do - and for sound environmental reasons. With the help of a clean tech start-up, Devil’s Canyon brewery has created a beer made using water from the showers, laundry and bathroom sinks of a San Francisco apartment block.Would you be willing to take a sip? Here’s why you should consider it. Is recycled water safe to drink? The wastewater that goes down...

Wastewater collected from the Ohio train derailment site could be headed to Maryland for treatment, Baltimore City and Baltimore County officials announced Friday afternoon. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said the city received a letter late Thursday from contractor Clean Harbors Environmental and Industrial Services, stating that the company is one of many sites across the country selected by the Environmental Protection Agency to accept, treat and discharge the wastewater collected from rainwater at the city-run Back River Waste Water Treatment Plant in Dundalk. Clean Harbors wrote in its letter: "Clean Harbors proposes to begin receiving this wastewater immediately once approval...

> Credit: Associated Press The Jan. 11 fire at Carus in LaSalle, Illinois, heavily damaged the facility but resulted in no serious injuries. Afire at a Carus plant in LaSalle, Illinois, has temporarily shut down the only US producer of potassium permanganate and sodium permanganate and is raising concern about availability of the important water treatment chemicals. The Jan. 11 fire destroyed a warehouse and caused extensive damage at the facility, Carus says. The firm declared force majeure on Jan. 18, saying it will be at least 90 days before it can fulfill orders for permanganate chemicals. The company...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will consider sampling wastewater taken from international flights to track any emerging new variants coming from China. The wastewater test policy is one of several options the CDC is considering to help slow the spread of new variants from other countries, the agency told Reuters. Countries around the world are enacting testing requirements after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced an ease in border restrictions and international travel beginning Jan. 8. The CDC announced on Dec. 28 that it will implement a negative COVID-19 test requirement for passengers flying to the United...

A 20-year-old New York man was recently diagnosed with polio, which paralyzed his legs. Polio once crippled or killed many young people in the United States, but was essentially wiped out during the 1960s following development of a vaccine. Because the New York man, who wasn’t vaccinated against polio, hadn’t recently traveled outside the country, it’s believed he became infected locally. Moreover, poliovirus has been found in wastewater in Rockland County, N.Y., where the stricken man lives and in a nearby county. It also has been found in sewage in New York City, according to an opinion article in The...

Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then, monkeypox has been detected in 10 of the 11 sewer systems that SCAN tests, including those in Sacramento, Palo Alto, and several other cities in California’s Bay Area.

The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, even though many may have started acting like the emergency has passed. A key tool in tracking the pandemic has been wastewater surveillance, especially when case counts and testing numbers have become less reliable with more people using rapid tests and testing access becoming more limited again.

An Australian team has found evidence of new psychoactive substances in use around the world by analysing sewage. The development could help health authorities stay appraised of the types of drugs in use Chemical analysis of sewage in 10 countries over Christmas and new year 2020–21 has shown how new psychoactive substances have spread across the world. One designer drug, the mephedrone analogue 3-methylmethcathinone, was found for the first time in New Zealand, having previously only been reported in Europe and North America. Over the last two decades, there has been an explosion of designer drugs that are being sold...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday it’s expanding a wastewater surveillance program to enhance efforts to track COVID-19 infections across the United States. “Go on, get the sewer jokes out of your system,” the CDC said in a note in October 2020, shortly after it first launched the scheme, called the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), which tracks SARS-CoV-2 virus levels in wastewater across 400 sites nationwide to better track the spread of COVID-19 in America. SARS-CoV-2, also known as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, is the pathogen that causes the disease COVID-19. The CDC...

We need to relax here, folks. We need to relax. COVID is contagious. Omicron is ripping through the US with 1 million new infections recorded yesterday, but the latter is mild. The overall virus has a very, very high survivability rate. Is it a walk in the park? No—but it’s not super Ebola. This isn’t The Stand or Station Eleven. It’s something we’re going to have to live with after China’s lab experiment gone awry. The experiment that Anthony Fauci’s NIH funded. So, given the hysterics concerning testing and a host of other COVID-related issues, we have a new way...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Even though there have been practically no cases of clinical infection, wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts, officials said this week. The omicron variant has quickly surpassed the delta variant in collections taken from wastewater sampling sites in Orange County, officials said.

Two cities in northern California learned last Friday that they may have omicron in their communities, even before any residents’ clinical tests showed an omicron infection. At the same time, eight other cities found out omicron likely hasn’t arrived yet, and every other community in the United States could have that knowledge as well. That kind of public health radar is found in wastewater COVID-19 virus markers can show up in sewage even before an infected person shows symptoms (and even though the wastewater itself isn’t infectious). Analyzing wastewater for the virus can detect a rise in COVID cases days...

Health officials in Florida’s Orange County said there has been a 600 percent increase in the levels of COVID-19 RNA concentration detected in the area’s wastewater since sampling began in mid-May. Speaking at a press conference held Monday, the county’s utility director called the numbers “very high” and “very concerning.” “Again, the results of the virus RNA that we measure in wastewater indicate that we will see continued clinical cases and hospitalizations this week, even beyond what was reported this weekend,” Ed Torres, director of Orange County Utilities, said. “Please, we urge you to get vaccinated and continue to take...

HAZELTON — The West Virginia Department of Transportation has entered into a consent order with the state Department of Environmental Protection for violations of the water pollution control permit at the Interstate 68 Welcome Center near Hazelton. The order, signed March 10 by Division of Highways District 4 Engineer/Manager Michael Cronin, calls for the DOT to pay up to a total of $75,175 in civil administrative penalties and to hook onto the public sewer system, eliminating the treatment facility at the welcome center. Half the penalty, $37,587.50, is to be paid to the DEP within 30 days of the effective...

Japan's government announced on Tuesday (April 13) that it will dump more than a million tons of contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, beginning in two years. Roughly 1.25 million tons (1.13 million metric tons) of water have accumulated around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan since 2011, after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated the region. The twin disasters killed nearly 20,000 people, according to NPR, and caused meltdowns in three of the plant's six reactors, triggering the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Some residents in Manatee County, Florida, were evacuated from their homes over Easter weekend as officials cited fears that a wastewater pond could collapse "at any time." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for the area on Saturday. County officials said the pond, located at the former Piney Point phosphate processing plant, has a "significant leak," according to CBS affiliate WTSP-TV. The Manatee County Public Safety Department told people near the plant to evacuate due to an "imminent uncontrolled release of wastewater." "A portion of the containment wall at the leak site shifted laterally," said Manatee Director...

Coronavirus was detected in Massachusetts sewage at higher levels than expected, suggesting there are many more undiagnosed patients than previously known, according to a new study. Researchers from biotech startup Biobot Analytics collected samples from a wastewater facility for an unnamed metropolitan area in late March, according to a report Tuesday on medRxiv. Eric Alm, one of the authors of the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, stressed that the public is not at risk of contracting the virus from particles in the wastewater, but they may have the potential to indicate how widespread the virus has become,...

The proof is in the pee. A federally funded study has confirmed, not surprisingly, that marijuana use went up in Washington state after its first legal pot stores opened in 2014. In fact, consumption appeared to double, at least in one major city, over three years — a conclusion scientists reached by way of the unglamorous work of analyzing raw sewage. “It’s stinky,” said lead author Dan Burgard, a chemist at the University of Puget Sound. “But we’ve worked with urine, we’ve worked with wastewater, and we’ve worked with port-a-potties. It’s not as bad a port-a-potties.” The research entailed driving...

The Environmental Protection Agency says it plans to scrap an Obama-era measure limiting water pollution from coal-fired power plants. A letter from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt released Monday as part of a legal appeal said he will seek to revise the 2015 guidelines mandating increased treatment for wastewater from steam electric power-generating plants. Acting at the behest of electric utilities who opposed the stricter standards, Pruitt first moved in April to delay implementation of the new guidelines. The wastewater flushed from the coal-fired plants into rivers and lakes typically contains traces of such highly toxic heavy metals as lead, arsenic,...