461 - How COVID-19 Became a "Watershed" Moment for Wastewater Surveillance
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2022
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Wastewater surveillance has become an indispensable leading indicator of community COVID levels, providing real time data a week or so ahead of health department testing reports. Johns Hopkins environmental health scientist Dr. Natalie Exum talks with Stephanie Desmon about wastewater surveillance for COVID and tracking new variants, why it's not a replacement for nasal testing, and how the technology could help warn hospitals about other outbreaks like flu, RSV, and antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.4 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond |
| 0:47.5 | talks to Natalie Exam, an environmental health scientist at Johns Hopkins, about the rise of |
| 0:53.1 | wastewater surveillance programs during the |
| 0:55.2 | pandemic, which can help officials understand when a surge in COVID cases is coming. Let's listen. |
| 1:02.2 | Natalie Exum, thanks so much for joining me. That's great to be here, Stephanie. Today we want to talk |
| 1:08.1 | about wastewater surveillance. And the first question I want to ask you is, what is that? |
| 1:14.7 | Well, it's basically flushing your toilet and getting a sample from that waste stream, |
| 1:22.2 | anywhere from when that flush starts all the way down to when it gets to a wastewater treatment plant. |
| 1:28.2 | And looking at basically the viral or bacterial genomes of whatever it is, you are flushing down the toilet. |
| 1:38.6 | And how is that useful? |
| 1:40.7 | Sure. Well, you know, I mentioned bacteriaes or viruses, but there's also ways to look for opioids or other markers of, say, human excretion. So this is useful, especially for the pandemic, in that SARS-CoV-2 has an RNA virus. So we are able to basically track at a community level infections and do that in a population-based way. |
| 2:07.6 | It's a naturally pooled sample with one sample of water or sludge from your treatment plant. |
| 2:15.6 | You can get a look at your whole community |
| 2:17.9 | and where individual clinical testing, say, with a swab in your nose could cost, say, |
| 2:24.9 | $140 for one person, for $300, say, for a sample, you could get a look at your whole community |
| 2:31.7 | in one day. And with a quick turnaround, it can be extremely |
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