Towards the end Last year, U.S. health authorities were alerted to an upcoming wave of respiratory syncytial virus, a seasonal virus that causes disease kills 160,000 people globally every year. Before hospitals reported an boost in patients, they noticed that RSV did more spicy in the Northeast, where virus concentrations eventually reached levels more than five times higher than in the western United States. Their early warning system? Sewage.
By regularly testing virus levels in public sewage, health care agencies can target treatments and interventions to the most affected areas before doctors on the ground realize something is happening. “If information is provided to hospitals or clinics a few weeks in advance, it will be an opportunity to think about what treatment they might need,” says Marisa Donnelly, senior chief epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, which helped develop a wastewater surveillance system for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
RSV is very common: every year It gets 64 million people around the world However, according to the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, RSV infection is particularly problematic in very senior and very newborn people. Preventive measures are available, including vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Often, however, by the time a community realizes it has an RSV outbreak, it is too overdue for the most effective response. Obtaining enough drugs can also be arduous. “Wastewater analysis provides better situational awareness of what is happening and how much it changes over time because we have [historically] cases of the RSV virus are very poorly detected,” says Bill Hanage, deputy director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
The concept of tracking the virus in wastewater gained importance in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, says Tyson Graber, a scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute who worked on wastewater analysis as part of the Ontario Covid study. answer. Initially, researchers did not have much hope. “Nobody thought that you could actually detect fragments of a respiratory virus,” Graber says. However, it turned out to be possible: scientists managed to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
This near real-time analysis of the spread of the virus has helped improve the pandemic response not only in Ontario but around the world. In the US, CDC fired National Wastewater Supervision System in September 2020
While each pathogen has its own “tastes and quirks,” Graber says, it was possible to adapt the process to look for RSV. Regular testing of the RSV virus in sewage is currently carried out in the USA, Canada, Finland and Switzerland.
Test An experiment in Ontario to track RSV wastewater showed that it could determine when RSV season begins more than a month in advance and almost two weeks’ warning of a surge, compared to waiting until people get infirmed. “We’re definitely seeing growth [RSV in] wastewater before we see the same increase in clinical data as hospitalizations,” says Donnelly.