Long, international flights are the best for tracking a virus through aircraft sewage, because passengers are more likely to use the restroom — and deliver solid samples — when they spend many hours on the plane.
“We know variants have been imported from around the globe,” says Alexandria Boehm, an environmental engineer at Stanford University who leads, one of the biggest wastewater surveillance programs in the United States. Testing airplane waste “can give us a sense of which variants are being imported and help us prepare.”
For the new project, the San Francisco airport is collaborating with the CDC and Concentric by Ginkgo, a biosecurity and public health team in Boston. Testing started on April 20, according to a spokesperson for the airport. Airport workers are taking samples from vacuum trucks that suck waste out of airplane bathrooms, using an automatic machine that plugs into a central dumping point. “We’re basically creating a composite sample of the trucks, which themselves are a composite sample of aircraft,” says Andrew Franklin, director of business development at Concentric.
The San Francisco airport has one dumping point dedicated to international flights, which are a priority for testing because passengers are more likely to use the restroom — and deliver solid samples — when they spend many hours on the plane. The airport is shipping one composite sample per day, six days a week, back to a lab, where scientists isolate the coronavirus’ genetic material and put the results through machines that map the virus’ genes.
The resulting data are complicated, says Casandra Philipson, director of bioinformatics at Concentric, as each sample includes hundreds of passengers from around the world. “Trying to figure out how to determine actual frequencies of mutations or variants” in the sewage samples will be a challenge, she says, though simply seeing certain variants pop up in the data will warn health officials about what to watch out for.
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