Wastewater monitoring is an important tool for administrators, but not without ethical considerations

In this pandemic-marked era, public health officials are looking everywhere for signs that could point to disease spread, including through wastewater monitoring at local sewer systems. Wastewater surveillance is a practice that’s long been used in many countries for various different reasons—Australia, for example, has a program that tracks illicit drugs in sewage—and it’s increasingly been tapped in communities across the nation as a way to better understand the coronavirus.

Prompted by concerns of COVID-19 spread, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System in September 2020 as a way to “coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater samples collected across the country,” according to the CDC’s website. The practice allows health workers the ability to “capture presence of SARS-CoV-2 shed by people with and without symptoms. This allows wastewater surveillance to serve as an early warning that COVID-19 is spreading in a community.”

But while sludge surveillance has become commonplace because of its effectiveness in helping public health officials identify trends and predict outbreaks, recent studies have shown that most residents might not be aware it’s happening. In a survey of more than 1,500 people published this month in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, a little more than half reported they didn’t know it was happening. Comparatively, 87 percent said they know about restaurant inspections and 76 percent said they’re aware of hotel inspections. In another study published this year in the scientific journal ACS ES&T Water of about 1,700 respondents from Louisville, Ky., only 28% indicated they knew their wastewater was being monitored. Notably, the practice is unregulated for health privacy protection.

The research is relevant because the practice is linked to a few ethical concerns, especially when it comes to monitoring sludge in smaller communities: “Wastewater contains not only a pathogen’s genetic data that allow public health officials to identify the pathogen, but also human genetic data that could potentially be misused. Additionally, communities may be stigmatized if wastewater surveillance data indicate pathogen spread or illicit drug use,” reads a brief from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

To read the complete article, visit American City & County.