Drinking Clearly

It’s almost impossible to catch pieces of sand floating in a glass of water, but once it has settled into a layer at the bottom you might be able to scoop it up. The same applies to viruses floating in water, each 10,000 times smaller than a grain of sand. A standard water treatment process uses metallic salts to encourage virus particles to congregate into manageable clumps that sink like sand to be removed. Researchers taking an extra cautious approach to the COVID-19 pandemic tested whether this treatment works on similar coronaviruses, to address any fears that virus particles in wastewater might be able to sneak into drinking water. They found that the free-floating virus (left, red) did aggregate into clumps (right), suggesting the purification process is well equipped to handle both coronavirus and other viruses with similar outer structures, such as Ebola, meaning everyone can enjoy their drink.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Kyungho Kim and colleagues, Chellam lab, Texas A&M Engineering
• Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Environmental Science & Technology, February 2021