Water Sector News

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has “done some very preliminary work” to do wastewater testing with airlines, Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said Wednesday. There have been growing concerns among public health officials to ramp up monitoring for coronavirus variants amid a Covid-19 surge in China.

“I think they’ve done some early piloting of one flight, for example, testing the blue water in one flight,” she said, adding that such a program could be expanded to test collections of wastewater from multiple flights or a single airport.

Freeman did not know where or which airline participated in this initial testing of wastewater.