Wastewater monitoring project could catch next pandemic early, says health agency The UK Health Security Agency is looking to set up an early warning system ahead of future pandemics, launching a £1.3 million (around $1.75 million) program to identify "cutting-edge technologies" which could turn people's pee and poop into valuable data on the spread of viruses. "Wastewater monitoring has the potential to be …
Given the immense difficulty the incumbent water authorities have with getting the sewage to the treatment plants instead of open waterways, I have a hard time believing they would be able to trace any particular turd to a specific town, let alone a specific toilet in a specific building used by a specific person.
Unless your weetabix contains tracking chips of course....
You’re assuming everyone gets treated the same. This is Britain: water companies can dump raw sewage straight into rivers and the sea and walk away with record bonuses, but if a single peasant lets a paper bag blow down the high street the fine’s in the post before it hits the gutter. Surveillance isn’t about catching every turd - it’s about reminding you which end of the pipe you’re on.
£1.3 million - great, so £1.25 million on Management Consultants, Lawyers, Accountants and HR, and £50k spent on the actual proposal which will consist of 3 interns asking AI for information related to these "cutting-edge technologies" and then asking AI to turn the resulting waffle into some pretty slides, and then asking AI how best to cut corners to reduce the overall price of any solution that is proposed (regardless of the fact of course that before anybody bothered checking the AI came up with anything actually workable, they ran out of budget).
I'm sure the outcome will be a marvel to behold...not that I'm a cynic or anything...
It seems an eminently sensible thing to do. Even with advanced tech public health is always the leased glamorous aspect of health care and yet the most important. Ideally it might be possible to identify sequences which seem to be evolving towards pathogenicity and even start working towards RNA vaccines for them.
AFAIK the Netherlands, which developed the system, and Germany still use it because it was so cost effective. I think it's helped identify reactivated Polio from people coming from Africa. In fact, comparative studies showed it was much better at detecting outbreaks early than the much more onerous and expensive self-testing systems, not to mention the "track and trace" nonsense.
Also, in Europe, the police, etc. need a court order to access the data assuming they want to localise illicit chemical labs.
At least in the US they sample at the treatment plant, so there wouldn't be any way to localize beyond that using the infrastructure set up for COVID. I'm not aware of any legal prohibition to the police sampling neighborhood sewer lines, I imagine waste is considered "abandoned" and open to search without a warrant once you flush it down the toilet / pour it down the drain in the same way trash is considered abandoned when you leave it on the curb for pickup.
Also in the US, we've been analyzing wastewater for viruses & etc. for many decades (1960s (for polio), some early experiments go back to the '50s). It's a known, fairly low-cost technology that works.
Yes, the authorities could probably narrow it down to the exact street of origin, and then go door-to-door until they found the source ... but the cost would be horrendous in both money and political ill-will.
The problem with going looking for environmental DNA and RNA is that these markers are very specific to the pathogens you're looking for. That means that this form of monitoring only detects levels of known pathogens and not unknown ones.
A better sensing system would be to include monitoring of levels of human cytokines in the waste water, to see if the population in general is doing more immunologically than normal. This would indicate a new disease is activating peoples' immune systems, and if you start seeing high levels of cytokines associated with viruses or infections but you do not see increases in the specific e-DNA and e-RNA that you're also monitoring, then you have got an unknown pathogen on the loose.
Or maybe not. I don't think anyone has done any monitoring of wastewater cytokines before, so in doing so you'd be breaking new ground and might see some quite surprising results.
Wastewater monitoring of illegal drug metabolites was another world first that provided a slew of new and unwelcome results. It tallied with normal sanity checks in that people took more drugs at the weekend than during the week, but it also indicated that a small multiple of the tonnage of drugs that the police and Customs had guesstimated was being used was turning up in wastewater. This is why you don't hear much about wastewater drug testing anymore; it paints Customs and the police in even more of a useless light than they are normally viewed in, since the amount of illegal drugs that they are not detecting is much, much higher than their supposedly informed guesses.
This testing also established that there are a lot more drug users in the country than was previously thought, and that most of them are perfectly capable of taking illegal drugs and not sliding down into a dependency death spiral. Evidence like this strengthens the position of folks like Prof Nutt, who advocates for drug legalisation.
There's obviously a lot of interesting (?) stuff in sewage. The tracking of specific diseases goes on but also there is a general interest in bacteriophages which develop in sewage. It's not as glamorous as 'Pharmaceutics'.
But where there's muck, there's brass.
Another bio-hazard suitable for processing and conversion, requiring investment -->
The trouble is, people still think the ‘war on drugs’ is about protecting them from harm. It isn’t. It’s a managed theatre: a controlled black market kept illegal not to stop supply, but to ensure it flows through the right invisible channels. If it were legal, the money would be traceable, taxable, accountable - instead, it’s laundered into property, politics, and finance.
Because it’s ‘illegal,’ the whole market is structurally violent. Gang can’t exactly take opps to small claims court for unpaid shipment, so disputes are settled with knives and guns. Customers have no consumer rights, so every rip-off or contamination spirals into more conflict. That manufactured violence doesn’t just scar communities - it fuels entire cottage industries: charities, think tanks, police task forces, prison contractors, even pharmaceutical giants who make billions flogging antidepressants and anxiety meds to the families left picking up the pieces.
The police aren’t dismantling the trade - they’re managing its margins: keep the street dealers harassed, keep prices inflated, keep the market opaque. And always, always make sure the stop-and-searches happen on estates, never in Kensington or the Square Mile. The facade is ‘public health’ and ‘safety.’ The reality is a state-sanctioned black market whose violence is not a bug but a feature, enriching the very system that claims to fight it.
Sacking of Prof Nutt, only proves the system works as intended.
The police aren’t dismantling the trade - they’re managing its margins: keep the street dealers harassed, keep prices inflated, keep the market opaque.
Pretty much the story line of the BBC's The Shadow Line (2011) with the added twist the sale of the trafficked narcotics financed the police pension fund.
No one is suggesting you can find novel outbreaks this way. They're saying it is a much faster and more accurate method of judging spread than by testing. Covid nasal testing fell short because early on there was a huge shortage of test kits, then once they were widespread it was still limited to the people getting tested which is not a representative sample.
Wastewater testing means you only need to do one (or a small number of) "test" per day for a whole city so you could start far earlier in a pandemic, before mass production of test kits ramp up. It doesn't tell you who is sick, or how many people are sick, but if you saw the levels doubling every few days early on in a pandemic you'd get advance notice something bad is happening.
Imagine if it was standard procedure for cities to collect samples and send them off to state/national labs for testing. Even if they didn't start testing US samples for covid until March when it became apparent this wasn't just going to blow over, they'd be able to retest older saved samples to see the timeline and determine where and when it first reached the US. If everywhere did this, you could pinpoint where an outbreak originated, or at least where it began to spread enough to show in high enough levels for wastewater testing to see.
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