Description:

Title: Flushed with Insights: The Promising Potential of Poop-Based Testing for Public Health

Speaker: Niall Mangan and Katelyn Leisman, Northwestern University

Abstract: Estimating the prevalence of infectious disease in a community is useful for public health resource allocation, policy making, and messaging. When diseases such as COVID-19 become endemic in the community it is essential to have passive indicators that do not depend on voluntary testing data. Our team is working with public health departments to use wastewater to inform our understanding of COVID-19 prevalence in communities throughout Illinois. We have developed a generalized methodology to improve the predictive power of wastewater from treatment plants in the Chicago area.

Connecting measured SARS-CoV-2 RNA to community prevalence is challenging, due to changes in the contributing population, the variable rate of wastewater flow, and the complexity of wastewater media, which impacts RNA decay rates and lab measurement accuracy. To quantify the impact of these factors we also track other viruses including pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV), a biomarker for the number of people contributing to the wastewater, and bovine coronavirus (BCoV), a lab process recovery control. We build and compare a set of multi-linear regression models, which incorporate PMMoV, BCoV, and flow rate into a corrected estimate for SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration. Laboratory methods evolved rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we show that correction terms differ depending on the laboratory procedures used in analyzing the samples.  Nonetheless, in all cases a statistical correction model provides a significant improvement in terms of correlation with hospitalizations and trend analysis over doing no correction.

Zoom: This event will be held in person, and also online via Zoom at the following link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97375525050 

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