Health
Sewage samples reveal polio epidemic in New York
Midtown – The polio chase begins in an unlikely and less desirable location. In a room the size of a closet, twice a week, workers pump up his 250 milliliters of about 5.5 million gallons of raw sewage and drain it into the Middletown Wastewater Treatment Facility. every day.
The bottles are packed in coolers and sent to a laboratory in Syracuse. So the researchers found out about the levels of her COVID-19 virus excreted by people who live or work in parts of Middletown and the plant served by the two towns. We have been testing these samples since August. Regular testing of sewage at that facility and dozens around New York has enabled health officials to monitor the rise and fall of COVID cases in each community.
But recently, lab workers are using the same samples to look for signs of another disease that no one was looking for just a month ago.
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Their quest began after the startling discovery that an unvaccinated young man in Rockland County in July suffered paralysis after contracting polio. revealed that traces of the poliovirus were found in a sample of Rockland wastewater taken in June.
The virus then appeared in the Orange County wastewater as well.
By Friday, the distance and duration of the polio epidemic in New York had increased again. Traces of polio were found in 21 wastewater samples collected in Orange and Rockland counties in May, June, and July, and in six samples collected in New York City in June and July. state health officials said. The processing plants that produced these results included the Harriman and Orangeburg county plants and the Middletown facility.
No one else was known to have been paralyzed by the virus. However, its presence in sewage samples indicated that it had been quietly circulating among unvaccinated people in those areas for months.
“This really shows just how potential a problem polio is and how prevalent it can be,” Bryon Bakkenson, director of the State Department of Health’s Office of Communicable Disease Control, said in an interview Friday. I’m here.
The gritty secret to that investigative work is that, thanks to COVID, wastewater has been washed away and test systems are already in place.
New York began analyzing sewage for COVID in March 2020. This comes shortly after the state’s first confirmed case coincided with a Dutch study on tracing coronavirus through wastewater. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection funded pilot programs in her four counties that same year: Orange, Onondaga, Erie, and Albany, which led to the state’s wastewater monitoring network.
of Communication network has grown to include 112 processing plants in 59 of New York’s 62 counties. Among them are six plants in Orange County and his two plants in Rockland. The partners in overseeing it are DEC, the Department of Health, Syracuse University and his SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse.
Polio analysis was the next logical step for New York’s surveillance network when a once-terrifying disease returned.
In some ways, the test was reminiscent of Yale’s polio testing of wastewater during polio epidemics in the 1940s, before the discovery of the polio vaccine in the 1950s.More recently, Israel sewage test In 2013, a polio epidemic struck and an aggressive vaccination campaign managed to contain the potential crisis. No one was paralyzed by the virus.
To the layman, the miracle of that test is just a tiny piece of very diluted evidence — microscopic viral trails left by a few infected individuals, untouched by the ever-changing mass streams of wastewater. I was kidnapped.
One reason they appear is that polio-infected people shed large amounts of polio in their stools, Bakkenson said.
Another reason is that the samples are not as random as they appear. Most treatment facilities participating in the New York monitoring network provide so-called composite samples, which combine sewage samples taken over a 24-hour period. This allows researchers to analyze the contents of mixed wastewaters multiple times a day, not just those that happen to flow at a particular moment.
A third reason researchers are able to detect minute amounts of polio in millions of gallons of wastewater is the sophisticated testing process itself, which pulls out the polio genetic material and “exponentially amplifies” it in a series of lab procedures. , says Backenson.
Unlike COVID tests, which measure how much virus is circulating in a community, polio tests only determine whether polio is present, not the number of cases. For example, in an area being treated at the Orange County treatment facility in Harriman, June containing the polio virus and he likely had polio based on his seven samples taken in July. Researchers cannot estimate the number of people with
Their only criteria is one case of paralytic polio ever diagnosed. Health officials say they are likely to be among the hundreds who have been infected with polio in the region. It is called “a corner of the
Health officials say the seriousness of detecting polio symptoms makes attempts to quantify the number of potential infections through wastewater largely unnecessary. It is a red flag for stepping up immunization efforts.
“Presence/absence is enough to justify public health action,” said Dan Lang, deputy director of the Department of Health’s Center for Environmental Health.
Researchers who have been testing wastewater for COVID-19 are using the same method to extract the genetic material known as RNA from the poliovirus. Simply put, lab workers extract genetic material from wastewater samples and amplify the specific pathogens they’re looking for, explained Bakkenson, an epidemiologist.
A network of laboratories across the state will test wastewater samples. For example, Middletown samples are sent to his Quadrant Biosciences in Syracuse.
Some laboratories store extracted genetic material. This has proven essential in tracking the polio epidemic to date. By testing these distillate wastewater samples, health officials learned that polio was rampant in New York City at least in May.
“It really helped flesh out the big picture,” Bakkenson said.
Polio strains found in 20 samples from the Orangeburg Rockland County plant and Harriman’s Orange County plant are genetically linked to a polio case that paralyzed a man in Rockland County. According to state health officials, the researchers sequenced his one sample in Middletown to determine if it had the same genetic link to polio and could cause paralysis. Couldn’t do the test.
The New York City sample was also unrelated to the Rockland polio case. However, according to the Ministry of Health, a public health concern was raised because the sequencing revealed that it contained a polio type that could cause paralysis.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for the Times Herald-Record and USA Today Network. Please contact [email protected].
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