towards the end Last year, U.S. health officials received information about an upcoming wave of respiratory syncytial virus, a seasonal virus. kill 160,000 people Every year around the world. RSV infections were known even before hospitals reported an increase in cases. more serious In the northeastern part of the country, virus concentrations eventually reached levels more than five times higher than in the western United States. What is their early warning system? wastewater.
By regularly testing virus levels in public wastewater, health care providers can focus treatment and interventions on the most severely affected areas before doctors on the ground know anything is happening. You can. “If we can get information to hospitals and clinics weeks in advance, we have an opportunity to start thinking about what treatments are needed,” says Biobot Analytics, which helped develop the U.S. wastewater monitoring system. said Marisa Donnelly, the company’s chief epidemiologist. Centers for Disease Control.
RSV is very common and every year 64 million people worldwide According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this is an respiratory syncytial virus infection, but it is especially a problem for older people and the very young. Prevention measures such as vaccines and monoclonal antibodies are available. However, by the time a community becomes aware of an RSV outbreak, it is often too late to take the most effective response. Obtaining sufficient quantities of the drug can also be difficult. “Wastewater analysis gives us better situational awareness of what is happening and how much it is changing over time. [historically] “RSV infections are severely underdetected,” said Bill Hanage, deputy director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The concept of tracking viruses through wastewater gained attention early in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, says Associate Researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, who worked on wastewater analysis as part of Ontario’s COVID-19 response. Tyson Graeber says. response. At first, researchers didn’t have high expectations. “No one thought we could actually detect bits of material from a respiratory virus,” Graeber says. But it proved possible. Scientists were able to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19.
This near real-time analysis of the spread of the virus has helped improve the pandemic response in Ontario and around the world. In the United States, the CDC launched The National Wastewater Monitoring System was introduced in September 2020.
Although each pathogen has its own “tendencies and biases,” Graeber says it’s possible to adapt the process of looking for RSV. Routine testing for RSV in wastewater is currently available in the United States, Canada, finland and switzerland.
the study Ontario’s experiment with RSV wastewater tracking helps determine when RSV season begins by providing more than a month’s advance notice and two weeks’ warning of a surge compared to waiting for people to develop symptoms It turned out to give soon. “We are definitely seeing an increase. [RSV in] We’re starting to see a drain before we see a similar increase in clinical data such as hospitalizations,” Donnelly said.
