More on sewage monitoring
Tuesday, November 01, 2022 ⚓︎
Sewage monitoring is low-level persistent in the news. Former members of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board write in the New York Times
the national reporting system for collecting and testing samples from wastewater treatment systems for Covid remains limited, uncoordinated and insufficiently standardized for a robust national surveillance system. If public health officials can’t track the data to mobilize a response to a crisis, the information that has been collected doesn’t do much good.
I had thought a program like this would have made it into the recently-passed infrastructure package. It would be a shame if health and safety monitoring systems (like wildfire or region-wide earthquake monitoring) were not built or strengthened in the near future.
Here’s more details on sewage on Jim Al-Khalili’s excellent BBC podcast, The Life Scientific: