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How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
He and David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, started working with state health officials to track the signal—from the treatment plant to a pumping station and then to the outskirts of the city, “one manhole at a time,” Johnson says. In a similar study published in 1959, scientists traced another typhoid epidemic to one woman, who was then banned from food service and eventually talked into having her gallbladder removed to eliminate the infection. “We didn’t want to cause panic and say there’s a dangerous new variant lurking in our community,” Ryan Westergaard, the state epidemiologist for communicable diseases at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, told Nature.
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