Warning!

April 13th, 2024| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Way back in the 1940s, to gauge the incidence and prevalence of polio, scientists checked sewage in different parts of the country to see there was any polio virus being excreted.

But now, building off from those attempts to see if certain diseases are on the verge of becoming epidemics or pandemics, researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston (your faithful blogger’s alma mater) have been analyzing public wastewater. They showed they could detect over 450 disease-causing viruses! Their work was published in Nature Communications: “Wastewater Sequencing Reveals Community and Variant Dynamics of the Collective Human Virome.”

There you go: sewage as an early-warning system for disease outbreaks!

Actually such monitoring of wastewater became more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic to predict infection trends, but the Baylor team’s goal was to go beyond any one virus, and to test for a battery of such beasties.

Said senior author Anthony Maresso, Chair of Virology and Microbiology at Baylor:

Think of it as a smoke alarm. It gives you precious minutes to get out the fire extinguisher or call 911. “If we don’t have vigilance, then it could become a blaze.”

The Baylor team leveraged the fact that many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, infect urinary or gastrointestinal cells, thereby shedding into urine and feces—and thus into wastewater. So, the team worked with water treatment plants in Houston and El Paso, every week packing up bottles of sewage and shipping them overnight to Baylor for testing.

After removing the solid waste and following a couple of rounds of processing, the team deployed over a million probes, or single-stranded nucleic acids corresponding to parts of the viral genome, and sequenced the viruses that stuck onto them. They identified 465 distinct viruses with this technique, most of which have never been detected from wastewater.

Maresso explained:

Hundreds of viruses are transmitting without your knowledge. If we can continue to sample these viruses over many years and we get access to very rigorous clinical datasets, we’re going to be able to start making causal associations that are going to be transformative in terms of the etiology of whole new diseases.”

Of course, such work has its limitations. These data are never going to tell you which patient or family is infected and possibly should be quarantined. But the data can inform public health providers about what might be going on, or even what is about to come. The hope is to identify outbreaks early and cheaply by continuously monitoring wastewater.

The authors have since expanded wastewater monitoring into 10 cities in the state, covering up to 5 million people.

Maresso again:

It’s kind of ironic that just about everybody in the world is doing everything they can to throw this material away. We’re one of the few lunatics that are actually trying to get our hands on more and more of it.”

Yup, there is value to waste! It can be a warning.

But there is a better warning that the Scriptures talk about. Scripture itself. Not waste. But a warning.

The law of Yahweh is blameless, restoring the soul;
the testimony of Yahweh is reliable, making wise the simple.
The precepts of Yahweh are right, rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of Yahweh is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of Yahweh is clean, enduring for always;
the judgments of Yahweh are true, righteous altogether.
More desirable than gold, even than much fine gold;
and sweeter than honey, even the flow [from] the honeycomb.
Also, Your servant is warned by them;
in keeping them is much reward.
Psalm 19:7–11

SOURCE: STAT; Nature Communications