Determining customer benefits of reduced influenza and norovirus transmission, using sewage surveillance

Untap正在应对我们这个时代最大的挑战之一，保护我们的社区免受病毒和感染的侵害。目前，只有在个人出现症状时才能检测到病毒。通常，这是在病毒传播已经发生之后。据估计，2019年流感和诺如病毒导致英国经济生产力损失4%；造成数十亿英镑的收入损失，数百万人受到感染。污水监控是一个不可思议的工具。它是用来衡量一个社区的健康直接通过他们的集体污水。人类从感染的第一天开始就释放病毒RNA，因此这可用于检测病毒的症状前期和传播前期。与通常参与率较低的横向流动测试不同，废水测试可以提供广泛的覆盖范围。然而，目前最先进的技术是人工收集污水并在实验室进行分析。这种分析需要几天时间，每个样本的成本高达数千英镑。数据的成本和延迟阻碍了在地方范围内进行污水监测。Untap开发了在社区污水中检测新冠病毒的原型：现场自动化污水监测。在这个项目中，我们将开发这个原型来检测流感和诺如病毒。然后，这个原型将在两个站点长期部署，将病毒数据整合到他们的日常工作流程中。这将使我们能够确定客户的利益，包括经济利益和无形利益。

Untap is tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time, keeping our communities safe from viruses and infections.Currently viruses are only detected when an individual presents symptoms. Often, this is after viral transmission has already occurred. Influenza and norovirus were estimated to cost the UK economy 4% productivity loss in 2019; accounting for £ billions in lost revenue, and millions of infected individuals.Sewage surveillance is an incredible tool. It is used to measure the health of a community directly by their collective sewage. Humans shed viral RNA from day zero of infection, therefore this can be used to detect viruses pre-symptoms, and pre-transmission. Unlike lateral flow tests, which often have low participation rates, wastewater can provide broad coverage. However, the current state-of-the-art is manually collecting the sewage and analysing it in a laboratory. This analysis takes days, and costs up to £ thousands per sample. The cost and delay to the data has prevented sewage surveillance being carried out at a local scale.Untap have developed a prototype to detect COVID-19 in sewage of a community: onsite, automated, sewage surveillance. In this project we will develop this prototype to detect influenza and norovirus. This prototype will then be deployed long term at two sites, integrating the viral data into their day-to-day workflow. This will enable us to determine the customer benefits, both economic and intangible.