1.0 CIMCITY COMMISSION INFORMATION MEMORANDUM
ADMINISTRATIVE BRIEF FROM MARTHA TASKER September 26, 2022
UTILITIES DEPARTMENT
Wastewater Sampling Program
The City of Salina is participating in a nationwide initiative to monitor infectious diseases
by sampling and analyzing the genetic material in wastewater from our treatment plant.
The program is part of the Wastewater Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network
(WastewaterSCAN) that is being led by researchers at Stanford University and Emory
University. The City is working with Verily Life Sciences for the sampling program for
this project. Data will be available on a public website ( http://publichealth.verily.com/ ).
Wastewater plants in participating communities sample three times a week and are
provided with materials to ship the containers to Verily's lab for analysis including
detection of viral genetic material with PCR -based technology.
The materials and shipping are free to the communities, and stipends are available to
defray some labor costs for sampling. WastewaterSCAN's national expansion was
made possible thanks to support from the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and
Bloomberg Philanthropies. WastewaterSCAN aims to demonstrate the value of a
national sentinel system using wastewater to inform public health measures and to
support the establishment of publicly funded, durable public health infrastructure to
prepare for future pandemics.
"Because it's population -based and unbiased by access to clinical testing, wastewater
helps us understand infectious disease trends in a community. We've seen how
valuable this can be as individual testing practices for SARS-CoV-2 have changed,"
said Alexandria Boehm, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
"Genetic material of the pathogens we monitor has been documented in excretions from
infected people that end up in the wastewater treatment system."
The scientists at Stanford and Emory are working with Verily Life Sciences, which
collaborates to optimize methods for high throughput, test samples, and produce data in
its lab, and with local wastewater and public health officials to produce actionable data
about COVID-19 and other pathogens. The analytical approach does not measure
infectious viruses in wastewater, but instead detects the presence of genetic markers of
the virus.
Presently there are 52 wastewater plants in this sampling program. Those plants are in
17 states and include almost 20 million persons served by those plants. In Kansas,
there are 2 plants — Salina and Lawrence.
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Sampling Sites Map
The testing results do not determine exact numbers of persons infected, but do show if
the presence of covid is increasing or decreasing in the community.
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A significant advantage of this type of testing is that it is monitoring the presence of this
genetic material with only a few days of lag time and is a more complete cross-section
of the population of these communities. The results are not dependent on the reporting
of individual test results and do include persons that may not have any apparent
symptoms.
The program would like to grow to at least 300 communities being monitored.