Province refuses to fund testing sewage for virus data
Saskatchewan's Ministry of Health says it declined to fund a project that scanned Saskatoon's sewage to measure the spread of COVID-19 because of “challenges and limitations” in how the data could be used.
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan brought a proposal to the ministry in early December, asking the government to fund testing it billed as a way to measure overall spread in the community and provide early warning of new outbreaks.
The proposal was made in partnership with the Saskatchewan Health Authority and the Saskatoon waste water treatment plant, the ministry said.
The Public Health Agency of Canada recently awarded the team $137,392 to conduct three tests a week in Saskatoon for 27 weeks, starting in early March, and to expand testing to select First Nations.
Results from those tests will be shared with provincial modelling teams, researchers say, but the province passed on putting its own dollars into the project.
“Based on the literature review, waste-water testing may be a useful tool for inferring prevalence of COVID-19, and to detect early signs of increased transmission at community levels; however, there is no report of the effectiveness of this method for ongoing surveillance to date,” says a statement from the Ministry of Health, citing challenges with comparing results between different regions, and variability in testing.
“The ministry has reached out to other ministries and agencies about any interest in partnering with the ministry. To date, there has been no interest in funding this project.”
Scientists across Canada have been piloting such testing to complement other public health surveillance methods. Saskatoon's team successfully predicted rising COVID -19 cases in the fall, but its funding was also piecemeal, and the plan was always to secure dedicated money from senior governments. In the meantime, testing stopped.
“We've been able to take some samples and process them with some funding we had from other sources, but that was really the end of the line for us,” U of S ecotoxicologist Markus Brinkmann said in an interview last week.
Engineering professor Kerry Mcphedran said Moose Jaw, Regina and other cities had also expressed interest in the project.
“I don't want to be negative against the province, but we've been trying in many, many ways to get funding from the province,” he said.
Brinkmann said there were ultimately no hard feelings.
“I do expect that the Ministry of Health has other priorities right now, but that's only my assumption,” he said.