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Indian scientists find covid gene in wastewater, may help in real-time surveillance
wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) for real-time surveillance of COVID-19 in the country. The study, led by scientists in IIT-Gandhinagar, found that increased “gene copies" of the virus in Ahmedabad’s wastewater matched the incidence of the disease in the city. With this, India “Joins the ranks of a handful of countries doing WBE on COVID-19", Andrew Singer, an environmental microbiologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said on Twitter. WBE is a promising approach to understand the status of disease outbreak in a certain catchment by monitoring viral load in wastewater. Recent studies had reported that the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is present in the faeces of infected individuals.