ArticleThe Science of the total environment2020
First detection of SARS-CoV-2 in untreated wastewaters in Italy.
Article in The Science of the total environment, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 434 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
434 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 754 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review of Methodological Approaches to SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Surveillance.Viruses · 2026Pooled it
- Recent progress on wastewater-based epidemiology for COVID-19 surveillance: A systematic review of analytical procedures and epidemiological modeling.The Science of the total environment · 2023Pooled it
- High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 detection and prolonged viral shedding in stools: A systematic review and cohort study.Gastroenterologia y hepatologia · 2022Pooled it
- Wastewater surveillance to infer COVID-19 transmission: A systematic review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens in municipal wastewater, landfill leachate, and solid waste: A review about virus surveillance, infectivity, and inactivation.Environmental research · 2022Pooled it
- Long-Term Wastewater Genomic Surveillance Reveals SARS-CoV-2 Variant Dynamics in Italy from 2021 to 2025.Food and environmental virology · 2026Article
- An integrated framework for early detection and transmissibility assessment of emerging variants in wastewater.International journal of hygiene and environmental health · 2026Article
- Assessing Urban Ditches for Tracking SARS-CoV-2 in Low Sanitation Areas in Southeastern Brazil.Food and environmental virology · 2026Article
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance: approaches, challenges, and opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- Wastewater genomic surveillance identifies the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 JN.1 lineage in urban settings of Gujarat.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Review
- Incidence and temporal distribution of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in the municipal wastewaters of the Buffalo City region, Eastern Cape, South Africa.Global epidemiology · 2025Article
- Genomic fragment detection and infectivity evaluation of rotaviruses isolated from wastewater used for irrigation in western Bogotá, D. C.Biomedica : revista del Instituto Nacional de Salud · 2025Article
- Wastewater-Based Tracking SARS-CoV-2 RNA and Estimating Infected Population in Industrial Setting After Songkran Festival-Thailand Traditional New Year in 2023.Food and environmental virology · 2025Article
- Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 Dissemination in Wastewater and Virus Isolation in Cell Cultures: An Integrated Approach for Pathogen Detection and Surveillance.Journal of cellular and molecular medicine · 2025Article
- Comparative Efficiency of High-Throughput Magnetic Bead Method and Polyethylene Glycol Precipitation for Viral Concentration in Sewage.Food and environmental virology · 2025Article
- Article
- Long-Term Genomic Surveillance of SARS-CoV‑2 in Campus Wastewater Depicts Lineage Trends and Public Health Implications during and after Omicron Waves.Environment & health (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Four Novel SARS-CoV-2 Infected Feral American Mink (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Wastewater Speaks: Evaluating SARS-CoV-2 Surveillance, Sampling Methods, and Seasonal Infection Trends on a University Campus.Microorganisms · 2025Article
374 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several studies have demonstrated the advantages of environmental surveillance through the monitoring of sewage for the assessment of viruses circulating in a given community (wastewater-based epidemiology, WBE). During the COVID-19 public health emergency, many reports have described the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in stools from COVID-19 patients, and a few studies reported the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewaters worldwide. Italy is among the world's worst-affected countries in the COVID-19 pandemic, but so far there are no studies assessing the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in Italian wastewaters. To this aim, twelve influent sewage samples, collected between February and April 2020 from Wastewater Treatment Plants in Milan and Rome, were tested adapting, for concentration, the standard WHO procedure for Poliovirus surveillance. Molecular analysis was undertaken with three nested protocols, including a newly designed SARS-CoV-2 specific primer set. SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection was accomplished in volumes of 250 ml of wastewaters collected in areas of high (Milan) and low (Rome) epidemic circulation, according to clinical data. Overall, 6 out of 12 samples were positive. One of the positive results was obtained in a Milan wastewater sample collected a few days after the first notified Italian case of autochthonous SARS-CoV-2. The study confirms that WBE has the potential to be applied to SARS-CoV-2 as a sensitive tool to study spatial and temporal trends of virus circulation in the population.
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