As COVID rapidly spread in 2020, public health officials’ attention went to the sewers. Detection systems for pathogen levels in wastewater quickly became the gold standard for understanding just how prevalent the virus was in different areas — and what variants were circulating. That approach has stuck, and many regions like Greater Boston are still using wastewater detection.
Now, a team of Northeastern researchers say this tool could help detect the next pandemic if we start regularly testing wastewater from airplanes at a handful of airports around the globe.
Carolyn Beeler, co-host of GBH’s The World, reported on this effort and joined GBH’s All Things Considered guest host Judie Yuill to share more. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Judie Yuill: So, Carolyn, how would this work?
The World’s Carolyn Beeler: Well, it is what it sounds like. When people use the bathroom on an airplane, once the plane lands and the toilet tanks are emptied out, samples from the wastewater would be tested. That could help track how viruses are moving across the world.
Yuill: Why do researchers think this would be better than the current surveillance methods?
Beeler: These Northeastern researchers say — in a paper that they published in the journal Nature — that if public health officials set up a surveillance network that included planes at just 10 to 20 different airports, it could help identify emerging pathogens weeks or even months faster than current methods.
Alessandro Vespignani was one of the authors of that report, and he went down to Logan Airport with me to tell me about this. He asked me to think back to the beginning of the pandemic.
Alessandro Vespignani, pre-recorded: One of the problems was that we thought, “OK, we don’t have people coming from China because we closed the border from there.” When instead, cases were flying into the U.S. from many other countries, and there was a lot of undetected spreading. So we want, really, to not be blindsided.
Yuill: But why airplanes specifically and not, say, wastewater from the airport itself?
Beeler: Yeah. These researchers say it can tell where a pathogen is coming from more quickly than checking airport wastewater, which would be a collection of samples from all over the world.
Vespignani told me that if wastewater from planes landing in Boston had a pathogen in it that scientists were worried about, they could then check wastewater from other airports around the world for that same pathogen.
Vespignani, pre-recorded: If you see different hits in different sentinel airports, you can start to triangulate and identify where the virus or pathogen comes from and the characteristics of that pathogen.
Yuill: Was Boston one of the global sites that the Northeastern researchers proposed as a sentinel site?
Beeler: No, it was not. But Boston does have something of a head start on this. It is actually one of just two sites in the U.S. where the CDC — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — is already doing this; they’re already testing wastewater from some airplanes. The CDC is expanding that from a pilot to a larger project right now.
Vespignani called it something like the equivalent of a national weather forecast for pathogens? Which, I kind of like that turn of phrase.
And there’s some data on how well this works. The CDC says that wastewater surveillance out in Oregon — this is just regular wastewater, not from airplanes — but it detected a new strain of bird flu six weeks before it was identified for the first time in bird flocks.
Yuill: So what would it take to pull this off?
Beeler: Well, this is already being tested out in places like Europe and Asia, but Vespignani stressed to me that this really would have to be a coordinated global effort for this to work as a kind of early-warning system. That would require buy-in from politicians and also, the public — us. Even though it’s more comfortable to think about the pandemic as something in the rearview mirror rather than something we should be anticipating to happen again in the future.
And, of course, setting up a surveillance network like this would require money.
Vespignani, pre-recorded: These are expensive programs scientifically, but this is like buying your insurance toward another pandemic event. This is a very good investment.
Beeler: So, something to think about as we hit five years since the WHO declared COVID a pandemic.
