Katy Graham, College of Engineering, will deliver a public seminar talk entitled “Wastewater-based epidemiology for public health: the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”
Seminar details: The seminar will begin at 2:30 pm on Thursday, October 20th in the IBB Suddath Seminar Room (room 1128). After 30 minutes of coffee, snacks, and conversation, the talk will then begin at 3 pm.
Abstract:
Climate change and increasing urbanization is expected to impact public health in the future by, e.g., increasing the frequency of health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. Several shortcomings in our public health response to such emergencies, such as limited testing availability and biases in testing populations, have underestimated infections and disease transmission, leading to severe health consequences. Thus, to track disease and target resources in a more robust way in the future, better surveillance and monitoring techniques need to be developed, particularly those that are non-invasive, unbiased, and quickly implementable. To this end, sewage surveillance, which has been used sporadically in research settings for decades, has emerged as a tool to monitor community transmission of pathogens. The ability of sewage to provide a “snapshot” of community health, regardless of individuals’ symptomatic disease status, socioeconomic status, or neighborhood, makes it a promising tool in the public health response toolbox. In this talk, I will present the underlying principles of sewage surveillance for pathogens, how data from sewage surveillance has been utilized by public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, and future directions utilizing sewage surveillance for characterizing disease transmission within communities.
