Wastewater signals match spikes in clinical cases of COVID-19, flu, RSV
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Key takeaways:
- Wastewater signals match spikes in clinical cases of COVID-19, influenza and RSV.
- Wastewater surveillance may be useful for detecting pathogens beyond respiratory viruses.
BOSTON — Expanded use of wastewater surveillance confirmed spikes in clinical cases of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus in one of Canada’s largest cities, according to study findings presented at IDWeek.
Kristine Du, BSc, a lab technician at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine, noted during a press conference that wastewater surveillance has been validated as a useful tool to monitor community spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CDC has tracked SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater since 2020 and began including wastewater surveillance data in its public COVID-19 tracker last year.
In New York state, health officials were able to identify the spread of poliovirus to multiple counties using wastewater surveillance.
“Wastewater-based surveillance is a robust and adaptable tool for community-level surveillance,” Du said during the press conference. “It can be used in addition to health care clinical testing because it is independent from testing biases, and we can actually correlate cases very well with it.”
“Just one flush can hold a lot of information,” Du said in a press release.
Looking to apply wastewater monitoring to other endemic respiratory viruses, Du and colleagues collected 24-hour composite wastewater samples weekly from three wastewater treatment plants in Calgary, Alberta, between March 2022 and April 2023, and tested them for influenza A, influenza B and RSV.
According to data reported by Alberta Health Services, influenza A peaked between November and December 2022, influenza B peaked between February and April 2023 and RSV peaked between November 2022 and February 2023.
In all three cases, wastewater signals from samples collected by the researchers positively correlated with clinical cases and test positivity rates across Alberta for signals recorded the same week (Spearman’s correlation coefficient = 0.83, P < 0.000) and the prior week (Spearman’s correlation coefficient = 0.85, P < 0.0001), the researchers found.
There are limits to how wastewater surveillance data can be used, but there are also many other potential uses, Du said. Tracking respiratory viruses is just the “tip of the iceberg,”
“Wastewater gives us unbiased, objective, comprehensive data that we can use in addition to other testing for assessing the community burden that disease may have, and it is complementary to clinical testing,” Du said. “Wastewater surveillance is a means of truly understanding how an agent can move throughout a population.”
References:
- Centre for Health Informatics. The COVID-19 response: Alberta wastewater. https://covid-tracker.chi-csm.ca/. Accessed Oct. 11, 2023.
- CDC. National wastewater surveillance system. https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance.html. Last updated March 14, 2023. Accessed Oct. 11, 2023.
- Du K, et al. Abstract 2074. Presented at: IDWeek; Oct. 11-15, 2023; Boston.
- Expanded use of wastewater-based surveillance unveils emerging flu and RSV trends. https://www.idsociety.org/news--publications-new/articles/2023/expanded-use-of-wastewater-based-surveillance-unveils-emerging-flu-and-rsv-trends. Published Oct. 11, 2023. Accessed Oct. 11, 2023.
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Du K, et al. Abstract 2074. Presented at: IDWeek; Oct. 11-15, 2023; Boston.
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