A technology developed by Hong Kong that uses sewage monitoring to detect Covid-19 could be deployed to track other diseases such as flu and dengue fever, researchers have found, with the method already adopted by about 100 cities in mainland China.
Researchers from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), who developed the technology during the coronavirus pandemic, said sewage contained far more significant information than the mere flow of waste.
“Sewage is not only a flow of waste, but also flow of water, flow of resources, flow of energy and flow of information,” Professor Zhang Tong from the university’s department of civil engineering said in an interview last Tuesday.
“Sewage surveillance could be a very important element of a smart city.”
The studies looking into the use of sewage for Covid-19 detection began as a government-commissioned project, backed by the Health Bureau’s Health and Medical Research Fund.
With the fund, the team managed to set up 26 sewage surveillance points in Hong Kong in late 2020.
