ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater-based epidemiology has proved to be an important tool for monitoring the spread of a disease in a population. Indeed, wastewater surveillance was successfully used as a complementary approach to support public health monitoring schemes and decision-making policies. An essential feature for the estimation of a disease transmission using wastewater data is the distribution of viral shedding rate of individuals in their personal human wastes as a function of the days of their infection. Several candidate shapes for this function have been proposed in literature for SARS-CoV-2. The purpose of the present work is to explore the proposed function shapes and examine their significance on analyzing wastewater SARS-CoV-2 shedding rate data. For this purpose, a simple model is employed applying to medical surveillance and wastewater data of the city of Thessaloniki during a period of Omicron variant domination in 2022. The distribution shapes are normalized with respect to the total virus shedding and then their basic features are investigated. Detailed analysis reveals that the main parameter determining the results of the model is the difference between the day of maximum shedding rate and the day of infection reporting. Since the latter is not part of the distribution shape, the major feature of the distribution affecting the estimation of the number of infected people is the day of maximum shedding rate with respect to the initial infection day. On the contrary, the duration of shedding (total number of disease days) as well as the exact shape of the distribution are by far less important. The incorporation of such wastewater surveillance models in conventional epidemiological models - based on recorded disease transmission data- may improve predictions for disease spread during outbreaks.
ABSTRACT
A 13-min LC-MS method was developed for the determination of daptomycin, a new potent antibiotic, in peritoneal fluid, blood plasma, and urine of patients receiving renal replacement therapy. Chromatography was performed on a C(18) column and detection was performed by a single-quadrupole mass spectrometer coupled to LC via an electrospray interface (ESI). The column effluent was also monitored at 370 nm using a photodiode-array detector. The developed method provided a linear dynamic range for concentrations from 0.5 microg mL(-1) to 100 microg mL(-1). Method precision and accuracy were found to be satisfactory for clinical application, thus the method was successfully used for the analysis of daptomycin in pharmacokinetic studies. The drug was preventively administered against Gram-positive infections to 19 clinical patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis. Peritoneal fluid, blood plasma, and urine samples were collected at 13 time points over a period of 48 h. Clinical samples were analysed following simple sample-preparation procedures and daptomycin was unambiguously detected and quantified.