Pretty sure I heard wastewater can be used to detect sudden spikes of drug usage or sudden outbreaks. Not surprising.

London's flows with coke

Yes, check e.g. the map in this page https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/html/pods/waste-wate..., it's pretty cool

Also, drugs can be used to track wastewater. For example, the quantity of wastewater flowing into a river can be estimated by measuring caffeine in the river's water.

I might be an overachiever here. Finally I’m a 10xer!

Wastewater hits in SF reported back in June:

SF Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/h5n1-avian-flu-sa...

LA Times: https://archive.is/VSjBB

Part of the article's suggestion is to better differentiate monitoring points, so as to divide farm-related hits from urban hits.

That said, in cities that have combined storm and sewer system, the latter is a lot more difficult.

But in general, it is a uniquely politically-palatable continuous monitoring solution.

The public doesn't want to think about what happens underneath a toilet or drain, so no one cares if someone is sampling and testing it.

SF has a combined sewer system, but it has zero farms. One question is whether it was more likely to be a signal from wild birds (into the runoff system) than humans (into the sewer.)

There's very little rain in the summer months, the average for July rounds off to 0.0in. I don't remember if there was any significant rain in May or June, but I'd be surprised if it was more than 1-5% of the total. I guess there's lawn irrigation, though.

SF has pretty limited lawn irrigation as well. Depending on how the sewerage system is divided, some parts of the city have effectively none.

There are three sewersheds [1] but we don't know which one the signal was detected in (or do we?) If it was the Northpoint one (~ NE quadrant) there aren't as many lawns there. There are a few small parks, street cleaning and whatnot.

[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/Cal...

Also, it's not so finely-grained that it seems like a privacy problem.

My university recently discovered a covid outbreak at my freshman dorm by testing the wastewater; that was the first I heard about the technique. It's especially effective for this use case: "Traces of SARS-CoV-2 can show up in an infected person’s feces days before any symptoms are detected, and even when a person ultimately shows no symptoms at all." [1]

[1] https://adminvc.ucla.edu/expanded-wastewater-testing-program....

Ah yes, a disease they only know to worry about because of testing wastewater. This doesn’t seem “effective” for any real-life sane goal.

The danish government has been doing that for a while, with open data available per region: https://en.ssi.dk/surveillance-and-preparedness/surveillance...

They also lead the EU wide project to track infections across the largest cities across europe: https://en.ssi.dk/surveillance-and-preparedness/internationa...

..and some lucky bastard managed to dig up some cholera bacteria from the sewers in Avedøre: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39085652/

this is kind of a thing in the States, the program is called Nwss. https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/index.html

Aren't most jurisdictions doing this now?

Some are, not sure about most. There is a cost, as with anything, so smaller utilities might not be.

Ontario's conservative government abruptly shut ours.

https://archive.ph/VVaoi

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-halts-covid-w...

>> which has cost $10- to $15-million a year since it was launched in 2020

Great link. Perhaps their decision makes sense given the cost. I had no idea that people were running around with fishing rods and tampons to do this. That is hilarious!

> Perhaps their decision makes sense given the cost.

What point are you trying to make? 10-15 million is nothing considering how valuable that data is for public health.

Public services cost money; nobody argues that we shouldn't have roads because they cost money to maintain.

https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/index.html has most of the public ones

The EU publishes monthly bulletins around DNA surveillance programs. "The bulletin summarise the reported results and findings from European national wastewater surveillance programmes. It also informs about the local surveillance projects and non-EU countries participating as observers" https://wastewater-observatory.jrc.ec.europa.eu/#/bulletin

why not just put the word "genetic/genome" at the front of that headline?

*kers.