UK, Indian Scientists Develop Sensor To Detect Covid In Wastewater

The technique could be used to enable widespread monitoring of COVID-19 prevalence in countries which struggle to conduct mass human testing.

UK and Indian scientists have jointly developed a low-cost sensor that can detect fragments of the virus responsible for COVID-19 within wastewater, paving the way for health officials to get a better understanding of how prevalent the disease is in a larger area. The technique, developed by researchers from the University of Strathclyde and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, could be used to enable widespread monitoring of COVID-19 prevalence in low- and middle-income countries which struggle to conduct mass human testing. The sensor can be used with portable equipment that uses the standard Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus, without the need for the expensive chemicals and lab infrastructure needed for real-time quantitative PCR tests, according to the research published recently in the journal, Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical. The sensor was tested with wastewater collected from a sewage treatment plant in Mumbai spiked with SARS-Cov-2 Ribonucleic Acid (RNA).