ArticlePLOS global public health2023
Wastewater-based monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 at UK airports and its potential role in international public health surveillance.
Article in PLOS global public health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Respiratory pandemic risk in the Anthropocene: A One Health framework and GISRS+ agenda.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Review
- International Airport Wastewater as a Sentinel Site for Genomic Surveillance of Human Viruses and Bacteriophages.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Effect of nucleic acid concentration method on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 detection sensitivity in aircraft wastewater.Journal of medical microbiology · 2026Article
- Towards ultra-sensitive and rapid near-source wastewater-based epidemiology.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Swift Realisation of Wastewater-Based SARS-CoV-2 Surveillance for Aircraft and Airports: Challenges from Sampling to Variant Detection.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Aircraft lavatory wastewater surveillance for movement of antimicrobial resistance genes: a proof-of-concept study.Microbiology spectrum · 2025Article
- Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 from aircraft to citywide monitoring.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Pandemic monitoring with global aircraft-based wastewater surveillance networks.Nature medicine · 2025Article
- Near-source wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, norovirus, influenza virus and RSV across five different sites in the UK.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Co-infections of SARS-CoV-2 with respiratory syncytial virus and human influenza A in patients with symptoms of COVID-19 in Ghana: A retrospective study.New microbes and new infections · 2024Article
- Genomic surveillance of Canadian airport wastewater samples allows early detection of emerging SARS-CoV-2 lineages.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Optimization and performance analytics of global aircraft-based wastewater surveillance networks.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Feasibility of wastewater-based detection of emergent pandemics through a global network of airports.PLOS global public health · 2024Article
- Use of wastewater from passenger ships to assess the movement of COVID-19 and other pathogenic viruses across maritime international boundaries.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Evaluation of the pilot wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Norway, June 2022 - March 2023.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Evaluating the theoretical performance of aircraft wastewater monitoring as a tool for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is well established that air travel plays a key role in the global spread of many enteric and respiratory diseases, including COVID-19. Even with travel restrictions (e.g. mask wearing, negative COVID-19 test prior to departure), SARS-CoV-2 may be transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals carrying the virus. Due to the limitation of current clinical surveillance approaches, complementary methods need to be developed to allow estimation of the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 entry across international borders. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) represents one such approach, allowing the unbiased sampling of SARS-CoV-2 carriage by passenger cohorts entering via airports. In this study, we monitored sewage in samples from terminals (n = 150) and aircraft (n = 32) at three major international airports in the UK for 1-3 weeks in March 2022. As the raw samples were more turbid than typical municipal wastewater, we used beef extract treatment followed by polyethylene glycol (PEG) precipitation to concentrate viruses, followed by reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 and a faecal indicator virus, crAssphage. All samples taken from sewers at the arrival terminals of Heathrow and Bristol airports, and 85% of samples taken from sites at Edinburgh airport, were positive for SARS-CoV-2. This suggests a high COVID-19 prevalence among passengers and/or airport staff members. Samples derived from aircraft also showed 93% SARS-CoV-2 positivity. No difference in viral prevalence was found before and after COVID-19 travel restrictions were lifted. Our results suggest that WBE is a useful tool for monitoring the global transfer rate of human pathogens and other disease-causing agents across international borders and should form part of wider international efforts to monitor and contain the spread of future disease outbreaks.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.