Research from an LSU professor and his students could make it cheaper and easier for small towns and rural communities to test for infectious diseases in their wastewater, potentially giving them the upper hand in public health efforts.
Aaron Bivins, a civil and environmental engineering assistant professor at LSU, used a 3-D printer to fashion what looks like a wiffle ball. It can be opened up, filled with a packet of activated charcoal pellets, screwed back together and then lowered on a string to sample wastewater.
The cost per ball: $4, which puts it within reach of municipalities that can’t afford the automatic samplers used in big-city sewerage systems. Those devices cost between $10,000 and $25,000 to buy and install, and they need a power source — not always easy to access in rural areas.
“The resources in these communities are quite limited, so spending $20,000 on auto samplers is not really in the budget,” Bivins says.
More than just an effort to see what pathogens exist, wastewater sampling can help scientists tell how diseases spread throughout human and animal populations.
Bivins and his team spent three months using their devices to sample raw sewage coming into a small wastewater treatment plant for an undisclosed site in Louisiana. Their findings were recently published in the academic journal Water Research.
The professor says the new technology could offer help fill the information void in areas where health care isn’t readily available or regularly used.
“When people get ill, they don’t always go to the doctor,” Bivins says. “From a public health perspective, this creates a lot of challenges in terms of knowing the true health status of a community.”
Historically, most wastewater sampling has focused on urban areas, leaving a gap in research for rural settings that public health resources often miss. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention runs a National Wastewater Surveillance System to monitor the spread of COVID-19, influenza and the common respiratory virus. The data gathered comes from roughly 140 million citizens, representing less than half of the U.S. population.
“Who ends up being left out of that system are people living in … rural places who are served by small wastewater plants,” Bivins says.
By making sampling tools more accessible, he says small municipalities and rural communities can gather more data, which means scientists would have more accurate information for their research.
“The idea that we could deploy these very inexpensive samplers as a way of monitoring what types of antibiotic-resistant genes are present in our community is a really powerful one,” Bivins says.