Monday, May 20, 2024
Mayra Santos-Febres
Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican journalist renowned for her incisive reporting and captivating storytelling. With a keen eye for detail, she illuminates societal issues through her insightful journalism, captivating audiences with her compelling narratives.
Wastewater testing does a good job at detecting mpox infections, U.S. health officials said in a report Thursday that bolsters a push to use sewage to track more diseases.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers found that over the course of a week, there was a 32% likelihood the tests would detect the presence of at least one person infected with mpox in a population ranging from thousands to millions.
Amy Kirby, who oversees the CDC’s wastewater surveillance work, said initially they didn’t know if the tests would work for a rare infection like mpox.
The chance that the tests could detect infections rose as more people were infected. When there were 15 or more people infected in a community, there was a 76% chance wastewater testing could find mpox.
The water that goes down a sink, shower drain or toilet can carry bits of viruses or bacteria that come off the skin or are excreted in urine or poop. Studies have shown wastewater testing can be an early warning system, signaling a bug has hit a community even before doctors start reporting cases.
Whole cities can be watched from a single sample, said Joshua Levy, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in California who has studied wastewater monitoring and develops related technology.
“Almost every kind of virus that we’ve gone looking for is detectable,” Levy said.
The U.S. monitoring system is growing but still a patchwork. Currently, 863 of the nation’s 3,143 counties — roughly a quarter — are reporting wastewater data to the CDC. Those are larger counties that are home to most of the U.S. population, but it misses a lot of rural homes that aren’t hooked up to municipal sewage systems.