Montreal Gazette ePaper

Quebec ends funding for wastewater testing

Researchers had been taking daily samples to detect levels of COVID-19

RENÉ BRUEMMER rbruemmer@postmedia.com

In the same week news broke that the Omicron variant had been detected in Quebec and cases of COVID-19 were nearing 1,200 a day, researchers at Polytechnique Montréal and Mcgill University confirmed funding for their project that monitored levels of the coronavirus and the presence of variants in wastewater is not being extended.

Sarah Dorner, a professor at Polytechnique Montréal who had been helping run COVID-19 wastewater sampling research since March 2020 along with Mcgill University and other institutions, said Santé Quebec was not extending funding for their work taking daily samples from wastewater plants throughout the province to detect coronavirus levels.

“Our project is ending at the end of December,” she said. “Public health is no longer interested.”

The sampling serves as an important “independent confirmation of whether or not you're really catching everything,” Dorner said. “And of course, with new variants of concern, it's kind of nice having samples that you can send off for sequencing.”

Dorner was among the first scientists in Canada to sample wastewater for the coronavirus when the pandemic broke here. Early samples showed a surge in the Montreal region as of March 16, 2020 — at the same time public health officials and politicians had been downplaying the severity of outbreaks because widespread clinical testing was not yet available. Similar wastewater studies are ongoing worldwide, Dorner notes. Ontario in particular has granted extensive funding for the research.

The researchers received funding for a six-month pilot project from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, which supports the scientific community, along with the Molson and Trottier foundations. “In a sense, it was a gift from the scientific community to Montreal's public health department,” Dorner said.

Dorner collaborated with Dominic Frigon from Mcgill's environmental engineering department, the co-ordinator of the CENTREAU-COVID pilot project, which analyzed samples of sewage water in five regions of Quebec, including Montreal, Quebec City and Laval. They conferred regularly with Montreal's public health department.

The project was hampered in part by the fact that it took part during Quebec's so-called third wave, which was well contained in Montreal “so our results were kind of flat, which reflected the reality in Montreal,” Dorner said.

Samples from Quebec City, on the other hand, where cases were surging, indicated a rapid rise.

“That was a different story — that's where the project really showed its utility, because when you have a big shift, you can see it,” she said. Since people shed the virus through their waste often before they have shown any symptoms, the concentration of the virus in the wastewater can predict whether cases will rise or fall roughly five days in advance.

“Every day that we have a head start on this virus is one day where we can implement public emergency measures, like restricting activities or encouraging mask use,” said infectious-disease specialist and medical microbiologist Dr. Donald Vinh of the Mcgill University Health Centre. “To lose that opportunity to gain a few days notice — we're almost shooting ourselves in the foot. ... It's very short-sighted.”

Conducting the tests isn't expensive, Dorner said, since the scientific process has already been set up. At this point, it requires two research assistants working parttime to pick up samples once a day from Montreal's wastewater plant. In addition, the “pipeline” has been developed to extract the RNA from the samples and then send it to Génome Québec for sequencing to detect new variants. That data would be put into databases and shared with scientists all around the world, but “I don't think they fully understood the benefit of that,” Dorner said.

The Public Health Agency of Canada had created a group joining researchers across the country who were doing similar work so they could exchange information, Frigon said.

“The Public Health Agency of Canada is still very interested, but it's just that things are not happening at the provincial level in Quebec,” he said.

Quebec and Montreal's public health departments did not respond to requests for comment.

Scientists had hoped that Montreal's public health department, Environment Canada or a private lab would pick up the project once CENTREAU-COVID had gotten things started and proven the project's worth, “but that never happened,” Dorner said.

Given the many uses of wastewater-based epidemiology to monitor things like infectious diseases or antimicrobial resistance or levels of illicit drug use in a society, the scientific method will live on, Frigon said.

“Whether Quebec researchers will be at the forefront of the development or if it's going to be developed elsewhere in the world and eventually we'll use it, it's there to stay, for sure,” Frigon said. “We've just seen the beginning.”

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2021-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

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