What poo tells us: wastewater surveillance comes of age amid covid, monkeypox, and polio

Amid widespread polio outbreaks in the summer of 1939, researchers from Yale University first detected poliovirus in sewage samples from Charleston, South Carolina, and Detroit, Michigan. Sweden’s State Bacteriological Institute replicated that successful find during an outbreak in Stockholm later that year. Reflecting on their initial discoveries, the Yale scientists concluded: “This virus can be transported, for short distances at least, through the medium of flowing sewage.”1Earlier this year, routine wastewater surveillance identified repeated signs of poliovirus in samples from London’s Beckton sewage treatment works, which serves roughly 4 million residents in north and east London.2 It came as a surprise that a nearly eradicated virus could be circulating again in a country where the last case of polio had been documented in 1984. Then on 21 July, health officials in New York State’s Rockland County reported the first clinical case of vaccine derived polio in the US since 2013….
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