ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE

EU – Moldova cooperation for wastewater health surveillance

EU4Environment Water and Data Programme (EU4ENV) promotes and builds capacities for the surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater and to foster permanent cooperation in close coordination with the WHO but also other advanced partners having put in place their own surveillance systems. EU Member States are strongly encouraged by the European Commission to put in place as soon as possible a national wastewater surveillance system targeted at data collection of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants in wastewaters. Main objective is to monitor the development of the pandemic with a few samples and to support the national pandemic management with relevant figures and predictions.

Scope of EU4ENV is to raise awareness of the required sectors public health and water management, to start a collaborative conception and design, involving the public and private sector including analysis of capacities, skills, equipment, sampling logistics, analyses, selection of program area etc. In order to support the Moldavian authorities, EU4ENV will support by knowledge transfer to build capacities for practice by training the relevant methods and procedures.

Between 28 February and 1 March, the EU4ENV experts provided a training to the staff of the virological laboratory at the National Agency for Public Health, on identifying SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater from Chișinău city. The training covered topics such as wastewater samples preparation and analysis in the laboratory, PCR quantification, normalisation of wastewater data, and trend analysis for wastewater monitoring data. The training was successful, and the virus was identified in the wastewaters from Chișinău. At the end of the training, the trained staff were awarded certificates.

The next step of EU4ENV Programme is supporting national authorities to establish a regulatory framework to perform wastewater health surveillance.