Titolo della tesi: Environmental surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a public health emergency worldwide. A significant proportion of cases shed SARS-CoV-2 with their faeces. The presence of viral RNA in wastewater was demonstrated early in many countries, including Italy. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been applied as a complementary approach for studing the trend of the disease and describe the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 variants. Italy was one of the first European countries to search for SARS-CoV-2 RNA in urban wastewater. On March 2021, the EU Commission recommended establishing “a systematic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants in wastewaters in the EU” (2021/472). In Italy, existing research activities were transformed into a national surveillance system, coordinated by Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS).
This research aims to summarize the activities and results of the SARS-CoV-2 environmental surveillance in Italy between 2020 and 2022. The present study focuses on: i) the first detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater in Italy, ii) the retrospective analysis of pre-pandemic archival wastewater samples, and iii) trend analysis of SARS-CoV-2 concentrations over time in urban wastewater as an indicator of epidemiological trends in the population. The second main objective of environmental surveillance, and therefore of this study, is the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 diversity and variants that have spread over time. This aim was achieved through regular national "flash surveys".
The results demonstrate the validity of wastewater surveillance for monitoring SARS-CoV-2 infections and also highlight its effectiveness in identifying circulating variants.