
Wastewater research isn’t for the squeamish, but it can get to the bottom of questions about such things as the effectiveness of COVID-19 air travel restrictions. Tests of toilet tank water from flights entering the United Kingdom helped Welsh scientists determine that steps meant to keep the virus from traveling among countries appear to have failed. “Despite all the intervention measures that the U.K. had in place to try to stop people with the illness getting on flights to the U.K., almost every single plane we tested contained the virus, and most of the terminal sewers, too,” said researcher Davey Jones, a professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Bangor University in Wales. “That might have been because people developed symptoms after testing negative; or were evading the system, or for some other reason,” Jones said in a university news release. “But it showed that there was essentially a failure of border control in terms of COVID surveillance.” For their study, the researchers tested the toilet tank water taken from long- and short-haul flights entering Britain at three airports — Heathrow, Edinburgh and Bristol — between March 8 and March 31, 2022. They also collected samples from sewers connected to arrival halls in the airport terminals and from a nearby wastewater treatment plant. During those three weeks, almost all planes had SARS-CoV-2 in their… read on > read on >