Looking into the sewage may be ghoulish idea for many, but scientists of Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR)-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) have been studying wastewater samples from the city drains in select places ever since the COVID pandemic broke out and over the last couple of years have made wastewater surveillance into a reliable scientific tool to assess disease prevalence in the population.
Chief scientist S. Venkata Mohan and his team has now become part of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT)-funded nationwide project in the framework of ‘INSACOG - Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium’ which is also looking into new variations from wastewater. "This is going to be a year-long project in which 11 national labs/institutes are participating. We have been tasked with collecting wastewater samples from Hyderabad," explained the environment bioengineer, who was working on wastewater treatment, before he waded into disease surveillance during COVID.
He explains how it happened. "We read a report in the 'Lancet' publication about detection of genetic material of COVID in the sewage and this set our research team to scour for material to know more about this so that it can be tried in our country too. Sufficient data or methodology was not available then to take up the project to a scale where the disease prevalence could be established among the people. We are also used to working with bacteria and the virus was a new thing," he said.
