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Wastewater Offers an Early Alarm System for Another Deadly Virus
Snooping on poop: A wastewater surveillance system that helped health officials track Covid-19 is now being used to track outbreaks of RSV.
Before hospitals reported an uptick in patients, they could see that RSV was more acute in the northeast of the country, with concentrations of the virus ultimately reaching levels more than five times greater than in the western United States. “If you can get the information to hospitals or clinics weeks earlier, that gives the opportunity to start thinking about what treatments they might need,” says Marisa Donnelly, senior principal epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, which helped develop a wastewater surveillance system for the US Centers for Disease Control. “Wastewater analysis gives you better situational awareness of what’s going on and how much it’s fluctuating over time, because we have [historically] very much underdetected RSV cases,” says Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H.
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