towards the end Last year, U.S. health officials received information about an upcoming wave of respiratory syncytial virus, a seasonal virus that kills 160,000 people worldwide each year. Even before hospitals reported an increase in cases, we knew that RSV infections were becoming more severe in the northeastern United States, with viral concentrations ultimately reaching 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.
Respiratory syncytial virus is very common. According to the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 64 million people around the world get RSV infections each year, but it’s especially problematic 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’s going on and how much it’s changing over time. has been vastly underestimated,” said Bill Hanage, deputy director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. 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 Surveillance System 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. RSV testing in wastewater is now routinely performed in the United States, Canada, Finland, and Switzerland.
A study of the Ontario experiment on respiratory syncytial virus wastewater tracking found that providing more than a month’s notice and identifying when an RSV season will begin during a surge was faster than waiting for infected people to appear. It turns out that the warning is given for nearly two weeks. “We’re definitely starting to see an increase in wastewater (RSV) before we see a similar increase in clinical data such as hospitalizations,” Donnelly said.
(Tag translation) Science
