748 - Studying Sewage to Fight Infectious Diseases: An Update From The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the CDC
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The presence of infectious diseases can be picked up through wastewater surveillance but how can this data be useful in predicting future outbreaks? Dr. Dylan George, director of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the CDC, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about how the Center's forecast for the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season performed and the role of wastewater surveillance as part of a multifaceted approach to aggregating data.
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh. |
| 0:21.6 | Jh.edu. |
| 0:22.6 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:29.6 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:31.6 | Today, the public health value of wastewater. |
| 0:35.6 | Dr. Dylan George is the director of the new Center for |
| 0:38.4 | Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. |
| 0:43.3 | He speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about how the center is using wastewater surveillance |
| 0:47.8 | to improve predictions of infectious disease. Let's listen. Dr. Dylan George, thank you for coming back to public health |
| 0:56.6 | on call. Today we're going to be talking about the latest from the Center for Forecasting and |
| 1:01.9 | Outbreak Analytics at CDC. How are you today? I'm doing really great. Thanks for having me again. |
| 1:08.3 | So just remind everyone here about what this center is about. |
| 1:15.3 | Yeah, the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics is one of the newest centers at CDC. |
| 1:20.0 | And our objective is to try to use advanced analytics to empower people to save, to keep themselves, |
| 1:36.8 | their families and their communities safe during public health emergencies by using data more effectively and extracting as much information as we can from the data that we have. And so in short, we're trying to create a national weather service for infectious diseases. So how can we use that same sort of |
| 1:44.9 | functionality for infectious disease capabilities? And you're building the toolkit now? |
| 1:51.1 | Exactly. We're building the team, the tools, the partnerships to actually make that all |
| 1:56.1 | happen. So give me an example of a project you worked on recently. |
| 2:02.6 | Before we get into what we're going to talk about today, just kind of how is this center serving the country already? |
| 2:09.6 | Yeah, so we've been trying to help in a handful of ways. Now, over the last respiratory disease season, we were developing different capabilities |
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