Dr Joanne Chapman1, Dr Joanne Hewitt2, Dr Anower Jabed2, Mr William Taylor1, Dr Brent Gilpin1, Dr Shaun Wilkinson3, Prof Michael Bunce2
1ESR, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2ESR, Porirua, New Zealand, 3Wilderlab, Wellington, New Zealand
Over the last three years, wastewater surveillance has gained international prominence as a reliable and sensitive platform for detecting COVID-19 infections at the community scale. Wastewater testing has played a key role in Aotearoa New Zealand’s response to the pandemic, with identification and delimitation of outbreaks allowing escalation of targeted public health measures as needed. Because SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels in wastewater correlate well with COVID-19 cases, wastewater can be used to monitor trends in disease prevalence, without reliance on individuals reporting their own results. With case under-reporting becoming increasingly marked, wastewater surveillance has gained prominence as a method to monitor disease trends, especially with the recent launch of a wastewater visualisation web application.
Additionally, SARS-CoV-2 variants can readily be sequenced from wastewater samples using tiled amplicon sequencing protocols – these data provide a community-level estimation of circulating variants at sentinel sites each week. We show that successive take-overs by newer variants happen rapidly and are synchronous across the country.
More recently, wastewater-based epidemiology has been deployed in New Zealand to target new and emerging infectious human pathogens of public health concern such as monkeypox, as well as internationally resurging diseases such as polio.
Wastewater-based epidemiology is a relatively new disease surveillance platform in Aotearoa and methods developed in nucleic acid isolation, quantitation and variant detection share many similarities with marine/freshwater eDNA/eRNA techniques, but there are also some key differences. This presentation will showcase some of the challenges, obstacles and lessons learnt when establishing a wastewater surveillance programme across New Zealand.
Biography:
Jo completed her PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford. She subsequently undertook postdoctoral research at Linnaeus University in Sweden, and the University of Kansas in USA. She returned home to New Zealand at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and subsequently started her position at ESR, where she works as a senior scientist on wastewater-based epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases.