A PREDICTIVE VALUE The push to use wastewater-based epidemiology for virus surveillance

By CAMDEN LAZENBY clazenby@shawmedia.com

DeKALB – Two years ago, Mike Holland, Kishwaukee Water Reclamation District engineer, began hearing about a novel way to test for the virus that causes COVID-19 in wastewater –today, the concept operates in DeKalb.

Holland, who oversees capital improvement projects with the water reclamation district, said he’d heard of folks testing wastewater for viruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2, to gauge how prevalent the virus is in the community.

He did some digging and learned of Northern Illinois University’s microbiology department and Barrie Bode, who chairs the department.

“So it got me thinking who would be able to do that,” Holland said, recalling his conversation with Bode. “[I said] ‘I think that your lab is capable of

Barrie Bode

doing that, is that something you’d be interested in working together on?’

And that kind of got things going.”

Bode, director of COVID-19 facilities at NIU, quickly latched onto the idea and found he had support from the university as well.

“We had the equipment, the knowledge, the technical expertise to measure virus and he had the sampling power and technology,” Bode said. “So we just combined the two and literally created a wastewater testing program out of existing equipment, existing personnel and technology.”

The program effectively starts from collection samples of wastewater from different sites on NIU’s campus, such as specific dorms or buildings to test.

“We process it in the laboratory and we measure it for the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Bode said. “And so people shed the virus into the wastewater through the feces and it’s a really good passive indicator of COVID infections.”

That passive indicator was a huge tool for the university when students began coming back to campus en masse in late 2020 after the spring onslaught of the pandemic moved classes online and remote.

“Having the surveillance here, particularly people who might be at risk, [gives] some level of confidence that we’re monitoring virus levels on campus,” Bode said.

He also noted the program “is a big deal” for university instructors, who are often among the most vulnerable population on campus.

“They like to have an idea of if we’re in the middle of another surge, and