ArticleThe Science of the total environment2023
Normalisation of SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater: The use of flow, electrical conductivity and crAssphage.
Article in The Science of the total environment, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 69 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review of Methodological Approaches to SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Surveillance.Viruses · 2026Pooled it
- Assessing long-term specific pollutant loads in municipal wastewater plants influent using monitoring data: A case study from Latvia.Journal of water and health · 2026Article
- Influence of Sampling Strategies and Disease Prevalence on SARS-CoV-2 Detection Dynamics in Wastewater Surveillance.Viruses · 2026Article
- Estimating wastewater concentrations of norovirus and rotavirus from global data on community-level infection prevalence and viral shedding.Journal of water and health · 2026Article
- Methodic aspects of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus detection in raw wastewater and presence in treatment plants in southeastern Germany.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Hospital wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 identifies intra-hospital dynamics of viral transmission and evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Comparative Assessment of Wastewater-Based Surveillance Normalization Methods to Improve Pathogen Monitoring in Rural Sewersheds.Environmental science & technology · 2025Article
- Article
- Hydrological and physicochemical parameters associated with SARS-CoV-2 and pepper mild mottle virus wastewater concentrations for a large-combined sewer system.Journal of water and health · 2025Article
- Wastewater-Based Epidemiological Surveillance in France: The SUM'EAU Network.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Agile, on-demand wastewater surveillance of virus infections to support pandemic and outbreak response in Rotterdam-Rijnmond, the Netherlands, 2020 to 2022.Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin · 2024Article
- Use of passive samplers as sewage surveillance tool to monitor a hepatitis A outbreak at a school in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Oct 2022 - March 2023.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Urban Wastewater-Based Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 Virus: A Two-Year Study Conducted in City of Patras, Greece.Food and environmental virology · 2024Article
- Quantitative fecal source characterization of urban municipal storm sewer system outfall 'wet' and 'dry' weather discharges.Water research · 2024Article
- Estimating the COVID-19 prevalence from wastewater.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Statistical analysis of three data sources for Covid-19 monitoring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Food and Environmental Virology: Use of Passive Sampling to Characterize the Presence of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Viruses in Wastewater.Food and environmental virology · 2024Article
- Wastewater-based epidemiology: deriving a SARS-CoV-2 data validation method to assess data quality and to improve trend recognition.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Diurnal changes in pathogenic and indicator virus concentrations in wastewater.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2023Article
- Capturing the SARS-CoV-2 infection pyramid within the municipality of Rotterdam using longitudinal sewage surveillance.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Over the course of the Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020-2022, monitoring of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 ribonucleic acid (SARS-CoV-2 RNA) in wastewater has rapidly evolved into a supplementary surveillance instrument for public health. Short term trends (2 weeks) are used as a basis for policy and decision making on measures for dealing with the pandemic. Normalisation is required to account for the dilution rate of the domestic wastewater that can strongly vary due to time- and location-dependent sewer inflow of runoff, industrial discharges and extraneous waters. The standard approach in sewage surveillance is normalisation using flow measurements, although flow based normalisation is not effective in case the wastewater volume sampled does not match the wastewater volume produced. In this paper, two alternative normalisation methods, using electrical conductivity and crAssphage have been studied and compared with the standard approach using flow measurements. For this, a total of 1116 24-h flow-proportional samples have been collected between September 2020 and August 2021 at nine monitoring locations. In addition, 221 stool samples have been analysed to determine the daily crAssphage load per person. Results show that, although crAssphage shedding rates per person vary greatly, on a population-level crAssphage loads per person per day were constant over time and similar for all catchments. Consequently, crAssphage can be used as a quantitative biomarker for populations above 5595 persons. Electrical conductivity is particularly suitable to determine dilution rates relative to dry weather flow concentrations. The overall conclusion is that flow normalisation is necessary to reliably determine short-term trends in virus circulation, and can be enhanced using crAssphage and/or electrical conductivity measurement as a quality check.
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