The program was shut down by the Province of Ontario<\/a> in July 2024, citing duplication with a federal program. The City of Ottawa took over the program, which is still used to monitor the presence of respiratory viruses and Mpox in wastewater.<\/p>\n Wastewater testing can be used to detect infectious diseases besides COVID as well as trends in drug use. It can also provide early warnings of dangerous contaminants in the drug supply, Plante told fellow councillors. Current surveillance methods such as police reporting, hospital data and self-reporting don\u2019t provide real-time data on emerging substances or toxic batches in circulation, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cSupervised consumption and harm reduction sites have historically provided critical drug check-in services and front-line intelligence about the local drug supply,\u201d Plante said. \u201cThe closure or reduction of these services creates a gap in Ottawa\u2019s ability to monitor toxic substances in circulation.\u201d<\/p>\n Plante now has two weeks to convince fellow city councillors to support the initiative, which will be before them on May 27.<\/p>\n Fentanyl and its analogues play central roles in the ongoing overdose crisis. Wastewater testing is reliable and anonymous. The testing can be hyper-local \u2014 such as testing around homeless shelters \u2014 but it can also show how drugs are moving around the city in real time, Plante said.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause \u2014 spoiler alter \u2014 overdoses are not just happening downtown,\u201d she said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cI would like to make sure that there is some sort of dashboard and that our relevant partners can access it, whether it\u2019s police, paramedics, emergency services, front-line workers. I\u2019m really hopeful that people can see the benefit of this,\u201d Plante said. \u201cDrug dealers don\u2019t make a consistent product. We want to be able to advise people who are working on the front lines about what they can expect on that day or that week.\u201d<\/p>\n In March, Somerset Coun. Ariel Troster said there had been more open drug use<\/a>, more overdoses, more calls for police and paramedics and more chaos in the community since a supervised consumption site at the Somerset West Community Health Centre was forced to close.<\/p>\n Two other sites<\/a>, one run by Ottawa Inner City Health and another by the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, will have their provincial funding withdrawn in June.<\/p>\n Last month, Ottawa\u2019s medical officer of health, Dr. Trevor Arnason, warned of a \u201cchallenging summer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy biggest concern<\/a> is that paramedic calls are going to go up and emergency department visits may go up fairly quickly, based on what we have seen in other jurisdictions,\u201d Arnason told the city\u2019s board of health. \u201cI think we as a community are going to experience concerning levels of requests for paramedic calls and other things.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of concern, but only so much municipal representatives can do, Plante said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this is one thing we can do at the municipal level to be an early warning, just like we did during COVID or flu season,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n As it stands, Ottawa Public Health already provides data on opioid-related incidents such as drug-related deaths, overdoses and visits to hospital emergency departments. For example, there were 45 confirmed opioid-related visits to Ottawa hospitals in March. In April, there were between two and six suspected drug overdose deaths. But there is a lag in reporting.<\/p>\n Under Plante\u2019s pitch to city council, grant funding to run the project would come from Health Canada and the city would work with Delatolla and Dr. Monty Ghosh, an addictions physician and associate professor of medicine at the University of Alberta.<\/p>\n Rob Delatolla in his lab at the University of Ottawa. During the pandemic, the wastewater surveillance program he headed provided an early warning for incoming waves of COVID-19.<\/p>\n Each sample would be used to analyze for two different things, with the disease samples being tested using chemical analysis in Ottawa and the toxic substances being analyzed in Ghosh\u2019s lab using mass spectrometry, Delatolla said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s amazing. There are possibilities here to provide a service and help people at risk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Dr. Monty Ghosh, an addictions physician and associate professor of medicine at the University of Alberta, says the goal is to make data about the drug supply available in real time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to know how the drug supply is changing, Ghosh said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are hotspots,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just about knowing what is going on with the drug supply.\u201d<\/p>\n Ghosh added that surveillance was sensitive about privacy and data issues. The goal is to make the information publicly-available in real time. The most effective ways to relay that information would be through texts or emails.<\/p>\n \u201cThe key here is we want to make it a community-led response.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage<\/a> and sign up for our newsletters<\/a> so we can keep you informed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rideau-Vanier Coun. St\u00e9phanie Plante is asking fellow councillors to consider wastewater testing to help identify trends in drug…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1642,19494,4897,9716,19498,61,19492,19496,19493,19497,876,19495],"class_list":["post-44194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-city-council","tag-city-support","tag-drug-supply","tag-emergency-services","tag-federal-program","tag-ottawa","tag-rob-delatolla","tag-stephanie-plante","tag-surveillance-methods","tag-toxic-substances","tag-university-of-ottawa","tag-wastewater-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/03ec6c553ed7c1a174534159823385df.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/a77cd2fdd79c16e63c7c8ddbc71f99d5.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n