OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Thank you for being a part of Oregon’s efforts to identify, prepare for, and respond to future pandemic threats. The premiere scientific journal Science published Wastewater surveillance for public health in January 2023 (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.ade2503) . The article concludes “There is now an opportunity to build upon existing momentum to form the backbone of future surveillance capacity and scientific ecosystems across the world. Doing so will require global surveillance networks to encourage equitable technology distribution, data sharing, and collective exploration of microbial diversity, both human and zoonotic, to help pinpoint possible outbreaks and spillover risks. Close integration with local and international public health organizations will be essential to ensure timely, transparent, and effective intervention. Wastewater provides the means to identify, prepare for, and respond to future pandemic threats - what remains is to expand capacity to ensure readiness for the next potential outbreak.”
Utilities: Consider joining the NWSS Utilities Community of Practice, a collaborative for promoting review, synthesis, and sharing of lessons learned among utilities to accelerate the implementation of wastewater surveillance. You can join by filling out the application on this page: https://nwbe.org/?page_id=41#how. See a video describing the Utilities Community of Practice (https://youtu.be/I7Ncj94Bw7U) by selecting the image below.
Influenza and RSV results. OHA has a newly designed data dashboard that includes influenza and RSV wastewater results. The 2021-22 and 2022-23 flu seasons were a pilot project for the OHA-OSU Wastewater Surveillance Team. After completing the pilot period and reviewing the data, OHA determined that it should be shared with all communities to serve as a historic benchmark for wastewater flu and RSV concentrations in their community. The new dashboard includes the current and historical flu and RSV data. Note that the flu data is the sum of the flu A and flu B concentrations. The dashboard can be found at https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/oregon.public.health.division.acute.and.communicable.disease.pre/viz/OregonsRVPWastewaterMonitoring/Mainpage.
Utility Supply Inventory. This summer we began a new supply shipping schedule, which included some built-in surplus, as we were trying to avoid issues we had experienced with utilities not having supplies. We know of some instances where we have over delivered! Please let us know if you have too many supplies, or too many of some supplies (e.g. envelopes).
WEF Network of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (NWBE) Website. This website has abundant information about wastewater monitoring for public health. Examples include:
“Communities—whether cities, neighborhoods, or facilities—that participate in wastewater surveillance use the data in several ways, and ultimately this decision is up to the relevant public health entity. These public health entities would not have access to this critically important information were it not for the participation of wastewater utilities in sampling design and sample collection efforts."
RSV and Influenza A and B Results. We began emailing results for RSV, influenza A, and influenza B last week. This will be in a separate email from the COVID data and will contain an excel sheet attachment. We will add plots for visualization soon. The OHA dashboard will also post the data this fall.
Changes to sampling. In response to movement towards a more sustainable funding model, we have begun collecting and analyzing only one sample per week for each of the participating locations. In the past about half of the utilities were collecting two or more samples per week.
Webinar. There is a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Immune, Infectious, and Dermal Disease Prevention webinar on October 19, 2023 from 9-10:30 am Pacific Time entitled: Occupational Risks to Infectious Agents Among Wastewater Workers: Prevention, Challenges, and Research Opportunities.
Article. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated the degree of infection throughout several Oregon cities (Bend, Corvallis, Eugene, Hermiston, Newport, and Redmond) by sampling multiple locations in the sewershed. At the same time as the sewershed sampling, OSU TRACE performed nasal sampling at randomly selected residences in the city allowing an estimate of COVID-19 prevalence. The wastewater viral concentrations were well correlated to prevalence in each city. The study concluded that “ WBE [wastewater-based epidemiology] methodologies can identify neighborhood COVID-19 hotspots and accurately profile the SARS-CoV-2 variant diversity present in a city or neighborhood. Considering that prevalence, hotspot identification, and variant compositions can be determined from a single to relatively few wastewater samples, compared with the hundreds or thousands of clinical samples required for traditional surveillance techniques, WBE has clear advantages in terms of cost.” The article can be accessed here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767012/
