Monitoring of waste water from international flights could serve as an early warning system for the next pandemic

The monitoring of waste water from international flights for pathogens would be a useful way to lead the next pandemic or even a biological threat from abroad, scientists say.

Researchers from Northeastern University show how such an early warning system could work in a paper published in Nature Medicine.

The article about pandemic monitoring says that networks of a maximum of 20 “strategically placed” sentine locations at the airport at locations such as New York, London and Dubai would offer a timely situational awareness of breathing diseases outbreaks and shorten the time of first detection of their international distribution .

“The point is to set up a monitoring system that tells us about the potential introduction of pathogens at a very early stage of an outbreak in the rest of the world,” says Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor Professor, one of the co-authors of the newspaper.

“We don’t want to be blinded by knowing that something bad happens if there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of things as it was for Covid,” he says.

In that case it was only in February or March that the US had a good grasp on what happened, says Vespignani. “We navigated blindly.”

“The idea is that you record potential genetic traces of travelers’ pathogens, especially international travelers,” says Guillaume St-Onge, a physicist and research assistant professor at Northeastern.

“We can have a lead time of about a month or two,” he says.

International flights are good places to test for pathogenic pathogens, because hundreds of thousands of people use them every day to travel from one continent to another and because many of them have to use the bathroom on a long flight, say St-Onge, a CO -Artor of the study.

“The idea is that we are building a Sentinel system so that we can see when something comes into the country,” he says. “It is not only for pandemies. It is for any biological threats, including those who influence national security.”

“There are many interesting things that we can get in terms of information about an emerging outbreak that can guide a possible reaction,” says St-Onge.

He says that setting up 10 to 20 Sentinel Airports seems to be the right scale for developing the network.

Testing of 20 to 30% of the aircraft arriving at those airports would “give very good results,” says Vespignani. “It would be great to do that for all aircraft at all airports, but of course we don’t have the resources for that.”

Metagenomic platforms can quickly be screened for a large number of pathogens, bacteria and viruses, including those on a “most wanted list”, including H5N1, says Vespignani.

Because liability problems exclude the identification of the origin of the airline of the waste water – and because a waste water could come from centralized tanks at airports – would determine surveillance agents the origin of the pathogens by using a triangulation system that would work somewhat as a Cat scan, says Vespignani says Vespignani says.

“After five to 10 detections we can know the origin. We can know the transferability of the virus. We can know the time of the beginning of the outbreak,” he says.

“We can see if we are observing a signal in New York. If we get a hit in Los Angeles. There are many actions that you can take if you have situational consciousness.”

The Sentinel network may have started detecting the SARS-COV-2 B.1.1.7 variant up to two months before it was actually in the United Kingdom, says Vespignani.

Airport’s waste water surveillance would collect pathogens that are worn by asymptomatic travelers, as well as those who have recovered from an infection but still throw out a virus, says St-Onge.

Asymptomatic individuals were a detection -challenging during the Covid Pandemie, he says. “We are not going to catch them through more traditional security systems. So waste water is a very attractive tool in that context.”

Vespignani says that the research from the northeast can be used by agencies that develop surveillance systems, including the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says that tests are also being developed in various other airport hubs in the world.

He says that systems are also being developed in Hong Kong, Canada and the UK

“What we offer them is how to optimize the system,” says Vespignani. “We can optimize this network of sentinels, depending on the problem.”

Surveillance can be released on a hotspot or adjusted on location to look for certain diseases, such as diseases transferred by mosquitoes, says St-Onge. In addition, external areas can benefit from the supplementation of regional surveillance systems without many air travel if necessary.

If there is a signal from South American, you want to understand better: “You activate a few sentines there for a few weeks,” says Vespignani. “I think the beauty of these approaches is that it is quite sparing in terms of resources.”

“We can get a better understanding of where an epidemic is currently active and where it previously sows new outbreaks,” says St-Onge.

It would inform public decisions about whether or not to do interventions, such as border closures, or whether it is too late, or would cause too much economic damage, he says.

This story has been re -published thanks to Northeastern Global News news.northeartn.edu.