Similar work is happening in France, where public utility officials sampled sewage across greater Paris and confirmed a rise and fall in SARS-CoV-2 concentrations that corresponded to the shape of the outbreak. Researchers are now looking into this approach to monitor for SARS-CoV-2. In Australia, sewage monitoring is already in place to better understand patterns of illicit drug use - cocaine, methamphetamine and other substances that would otherwise be difficult to test and track. Similarly, in Mumbai, India, researchers were able to detect poliovirus in sewage three months before any cases were observed. The monitoring program, set up in 1989 by the Israeli health department, had previously detected at least four other “silent” episodes of poliovirus before clinical cases were reported. Not a single case of paralysis was ultimately reported. This heads-up gave the government enough time to launch a vaccination campaign and contain the virus. In Israel in 2013, a polio epidemic was detected in the sewage before any clinics had reported cases. All this information, when pieced together, is critical to informing and validating public health decisions - such as where to allocate medical supplies and when to reopen schools, restaurants and other public gathering spaces.Īnd as cities start loosening stay-at-home orders in the coming weeks and months, some say monitoring sewage could also provide early warnings if the virus suddenly makes a comeback.Īmericans might find the idea gross, but wastewater early warning systems have helped catch norovirus, Hepatitis A and other diseases around the world for decades. The amount of virus detected in the sewage can, in essence, mirror the timing and scale of an outbreak in ways that more delayed (and more expensive) in-person testing cannot, experts say. “The closest approach to replicating the data from wastewater would be to literally test every single person in a community and then take the average of that. “With wastewater, you can very quickly get a snapshot of an entire population,” said Mariana Matus, who co-founded Biobot Analytics, a wastewater epidemiology start-up inspired by her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sewage data could potentially help fill these gaps by capturing critical information in the aggregate. Understanding the true scale of COVID-19 has been a major stumbling block across the country, as officials struggle with testing shortages, false negatives, and people who are infected but have no symptoms. Initial studies show that sewage monitoring, or “wastewater-based-epidemiology,” could not only tell us how much the virus might actually be spreading in a community - but also when the virus has finally gone away. With the nation growing ever more weary of sweeping stay-at-home orders and a worsening economy, some scientists say our poop could be the key to determining when a community might consider easing health restrictions.įrom Stanford to the University of Arizona, from Australia to Paris, teams of researchers have been ramping up wastewater analyses to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Every day, millions of Americans could be flushing critical coronavirus data down the toilet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |