Integrating Virus Monitoring Strategies for Safe Non-potable Water Reuse

Sunny C Jiang; Heather N Bischel; Ramesh Goel; Diego Rosso; Samendra Sherchan; Katrine L Whiteson; Tao Yan; Helena M Solo-Gabriele

doi:10.3390/w14081187

Integrating Virus Monitoring Strategies for Safe Non-potable Water Reuse

Water (Basel). 2022 Apr 2;14(8):1187. doi: 10.3390/w14081187. Epub 2022 Apr 7.

Authors

Sunny C Jiang^{1

2}, Heather N Bischel³, Ramesh Goel⁴, Diego Rosso^{1

2}, Samendra Sherchan⁵, Katrine L Whiteson⁶, Tao Yan⁷, Helena M Solo-Gabriele⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
² Water-Energy Nexus Center, 844G Engineering Tower, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-2175.
³ Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis CA 95616.
⁴ Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.
⁵ Department of Environmental Health sciences, Tulane university, New Orleans, LA 70112.
⁶ Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
⁷ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Water Resources Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI 96822, USA.
⁸ Department of Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 33146, USA.

Abstract

Wastewater reclamation and reuse have the potential to supplement water supplies, offering resiliency in times of drought and helping meet increased water demands associated with population growth. Non-potable water reuse represents the largest potential reuse market. Yet economic constraints for new water reuse infrastructure and safety concerns due to microbial water quality, and especially viral pathogen exposure, limit widespread implementation of water reuse. Cost-effective, real-time methods to measure or indicate viral quality of recycled water would do much to instill greater confidence in the practice. This manuscript discusses advancements in monitoring and modeling of viral health risks in the context of water reuse. First, we describe the current wastewater reclamation processes and treatment technologies with an emphasis on virus removal. Second, we review technologies for the measurement of viruses, both culture- and molecular-based, along with their advantages and disadvantages. We introduce promising viral surrogates and specific pathogenic viruses that can serve as indicators of viral risk for water reuse. We suggest metagenomic analyses for viral screening and flow cytometry for quantification of virus-like particles as new approaches to complement more traditional methods. Third, we describe modeling to assess health risks through quantitative microbial risk assessments (QMRAs), the most common strategy to couple data on virus concentrations with human exposure scenarios. We then explore the potential of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to incorporate suites of data from wastewater treatment processes, water quality parameters, and viral surrogates. We recommend ANNs as a means to utilize existing water quality data, alongside new complementary measures of viral quality, to achieve cost-effective strategies to assess risks associated with infectious human viruses in recycled water. Given the review, we conclude that technologies are ready for identifying and implementing viral surrogates for health risk reduction in the next decade. Incorporating modeling with monitoring data would likely result in more robust assessment of water reuse risk.

Keywords: Modeling; Reuse; Surrogates; Viruses; Wastewater.

Abstract

Grants and funding