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Wastewater Testing as a COVID‑19 Early Warning System Municipal Water Leader about how this method of testing works and its advantages. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be at your current position at WRF. Peter Grevatt: Prior to joining WRF as CEO, I had a 30‑year career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I served in a variety of roles at the EPA, and during my last 6 years there, I was the director of the National Drinking Water Program. In that position, I had a lot of experience working with municipal water leaders of all types as a regulator. In terms of my academic background, I have a doctorate in environmental health from the basic medical sciences program at New York University Medical Center. That gives me a grounding in the public-health aspects of the services that the water sector provides. Protecting public health and the environment is fundamentally what water utilities are there to do. Municipal Water Leader: Would you introduce WRF?
Trussell Technologies staff conducting wastewater sampling as part of a WRF research project.
can provide an invaluable early warning of an outbreak to public health officials. One institution that is helping to advance research into this method of detection is The Water Research Foundation (WRF). In addition to funding research itself, it has helped to facilitate information interchange among the many global utilities and research groups that are implementing and improving this method of testing. In this interview, WRF CEO Peter Grevatt tells
34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | October 2020
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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRUSSELL TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
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oday, everyone knows that individuals can be tested for current COVID‑19 infections or for the presence of antibodies that suggest a past infection. What fewer people may realize is that wastewater can be tested for residual genetic material that signals that SARSCoV-2, commonly known as the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19, is present within a community. This broad snapshot of coronavirus presence within a community
Peter Grevatt: WRF is the world’s leading research collaborative supporting the water sector. We do research on a broad range of topics, focused on helping the water sector to do its work to protect public health and the environment most efficiently and effectively. Most of our research is funded by our subscribers. We work with our subscribers to identify their most important research priorities, oversee the carrying out of that research, and provide the results back to our subscribers. We have over 1,200 subscribers across six continents, more than 1,000 of which are water utilities, some of them public and
