May 19, 2022
Irene Xagoraraki continues to hunt pathogens in wastewater
The country’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention are actively tracking pathogens, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater at thousands of testing sites across the country.
Among them is Detroit’s wastewater site, which is characterized as a sentinel site for the CDC, says Michigan State University environmental engineering professor Irene Xagoraraki, who leads one of the state's largest wastewater monitoring projects.
Xagoraraki said her team is perfectly positioned to monitor Detroit's wastewater for the virus that causes COVID-19 because she and her students were the only researcher group in Michigan who was systematically monitoring wastewater for pathogens prior to the pandemic and were able to predict a Hepatitis A outbreak in the region in 2017-18.
She said Southeast Michigan’s sewer collection network includes three interseptors that provide samples from the majority of the tri-county area. It allows her team to collect samples that cover three county health departments and the Detroit health department.
Her research team includes postdoctorate researchers Yabing Li and Yangyang Zou, Ph.D. students Brijen Miyani and Liang Zhao, master’s students Maddie Spooner and Zach Gentry, and Sydney Jacobi, a junior in biosystems engineering.
Xagoraraki’s research on Detroit wastewater began in 2017 with a National Science Foundation grant that focused on Hepatitis and other viral diseases. In 2020, she received $800,000 from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, and $267,000 from the Great Lakes Water Authority.
"For 2021-2023, my research group is working with $3.7 million from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to survey wastewater in the Detroit Metropolitan area and create and validate and viral disease prediction model.
"The hope is that COVID-19 will die out but the application of this methodology is critical in detecting other endemic or emerging viral infections in the population of the Detroit tri-county area,” she added.
Read more on Xagoraraki’s research at MSUToday.
