170 - COVID-19 Surveillance in the Sewers: What Wastewater Can Tell Us About Outbreaks and Community Health
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The University of Arizona recently tracked a potential COVID-19 outbreak in a dorm by testing sewage. Johns Hopkins chemist Dr. Carsten Prasse, who studies wastewater-based epidemiology, talks with Stephanie Desmon about what poop can tell us about the health of individuals and communities, privacy concerns, and how sewage surveillance could be part of the COVID-19 response in certain circumstances.
KEYWORDS: pandemic response; viral shedding; human waste
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.7 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health |
| 0:32.7 | officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | public health question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:49.3 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Carson Prasa, a Johns Hopkins chemist who studies wastewater-based |
| 0:57.0 | epidemiology, basically what you can learn about communities by testing their poop. This tool |
| 1:03.8 | was recently used in Arizona to find asymptomatic people with COVID and stop an outbreak before |
| 1:10.3 | it could start. Let's listen. |
| 1:13.9 | Carson Brassa, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. So today we're going to talk about, |
| 1:19.9 | well actually I'm not sure how to talk about it. So I want to call it poop. What do you want to call it? |
| 1:25.0 | Yeah, it's part of it. Let's call it sewage. |
| 1:27.9 | Okay. |
| 1:28.7 | That's good. |
| 1:30.0 | It's not only poop. |
| 1:31.4 | There's a bunch of other things in there. |
| 1:32.2 | Right. |
| 1:35.9 | So we're talking about sewage and COVID. |
| 1:42.2 | I recently heard that, I think a lot of us have heard the story that at the University of Arizona, they were testing the sewage from many of |
| 1:44.9 | their dorms, and they found evidence of COVID in the sewage at one dorm, and were able to sort of |
... |
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