The Voice - Summer 2021 - 15

ADVOCACY IN ACTION
MEMBER PROFILE
Using Wastewater to
Detect COVID-19:
OSPE Member Michael Loken, P.Eng.
surprising results. The impact was profound, as Loken
explains, " wastewater can be used to flag when outbreaks
are going to happen. You can detect an increase in the RNA. "
In the City of Greater Sudbury wastewater treatment
facilities under Loken's management are eager to continue
testing the runoff and hope that increased attention to
this method, leading to newer technologies, can lead to
interesting developments. " As with any kind of engineering
puzzle, nobody knows how to use this data effectively and
powerfully yet. The goal is to get the data, and people will
figure out how to use it. The next time we have any type of
outbreak we would be able to measure and track it in the
community. "
It's not just Loken's team that sees the value in this new
O
SPE Member Michael Loken, P.Eng., Manager
of Wastewater Treatment in Greater Sudbury,
Ontario, believes in looking for the right solutions
in the wrong places. While provinces worked to
understand the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic
in 2020, a team at Health Sciences North Research Institute
(HSNRI), Laurentian University and the City of Greater Sudbury
followed the lead of researchers in Amsterdam, Netherlands,
who had made a startling discovery: the presence of SARScoronoavirus-2
in sewage.
Sewage systems - the arteries under every city, ensuring
the steady flow of wastewater to treatment plants - contained
ribonucleic acid (RNA) fragments that allowed researchers to
discover levels of COVID-19. This simple discovery, uncovered
after an investigation into an unlikely source, could have longstanding
repercussions for pandemic preparation across the
globe. The team in Greater Sudbury, following the work already
being done in Ottawa and Waterloo, is hoping to advance this
research.
Ribonucleic acid, commonly known as RNA, is one of the
building blocks of life, alongside DNA and protein. And as Loken
notes, it is relatively easy to examine for increased occurrences
of COVID-19, which is passed along in human feces, especially
in COVID-19 patients who exhibit diarrhea as one of their
symptoms. By examining the sewage found in one of these
centralized treatment centres, the hope is that COVID-19 can
be determined in a population before widespread contagion; for
example, it could be a more practical and pro-active solution than
testing asymptomatic people.
It was in March 2020 that researchers in the Netherlands
began testing wastewater for the virus and discovered their
method either, as the Government of Ontario recently
announced the allocation of $12.2 million over the next
two years to fund the Ontario Wastewater Surveillance
Initiative. The purpose of the initiative is to determine
whether wastewater surveillance can be used in
conjunction with clinical data as a tool to inform a public
health response.
Loken's goal is for teams to be able to identify outbreaks in
localized ways. " We're trying to look for biological markers
in excrement. But you don't generate a lot of that in a single
house. It doesn't contain that valuable genetic information
we're looking for. When it all gets collected, that's where
we're looking at. " Explaining that currently, they are able
to look at samples on a macro level at the major treatment
facilities, but that in the future, with the development of
localized, portable technologies, testing would not only be
able to locate the spread to communities hardest hit, but
predict where outbreaks are happening, and to see which
communities are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks.
While Loken and his team are supporting the Wastewater
Surveillance Initiative, they are hoping to prove the
usefulness of other new technologies. " The current method
for detection is called PCR analysis, which is incredibly
accurate but requires a full lab and a variety of equipment
and reagents. The problem is that this isn't a feasible
technique for every community. " What Loken hopes to
highlight is the usefulness of MinION by Oxford Nanopore
Technologies. The MinION device is roughly the size of a
cell phone, requires only a small sample and within a couple
of hours creates a full genetic sequencing of the sample.
Loken is hoping that if the MinION proves to be reliable
and accurate, it could be an incredibly useful public health
tool for remote First Nations or other northern Ontario
communities that don't have access to the wastewater
treatment facilities that cities like Sudbury have at their
disposal.
June 2021 THE VOICE
15
The Voice - Summer 2021

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