Waste surveillance at just 20 airports could spot the next pandemic

A global early-warning system for disease outbreaks and even future pandemics is possible with minimal monitoring: testing the waste water from a fraction of international flight arrivals at just 20 airports around the world. When passengers fly while infected with bacteria or viruses, they can leave traces of these pathogens in their waste, which airports collect from a plane after the flight lands. “If you’re going to the bathroom on an aircraft, and if you blow your nose and put that in the toilet – or if you do whatever you have to do – there’s some chance that some of the genetic material from the pathogen is going into the waste water,” says Guillaume St-Onge at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. St-Onge and his colleagues used a simulator called the Global Epidemic and Mobility model to analyse how airport waste-water surveillance networks could detect emerging variants of a virus like the one that causes covid-19. By testing the model using different numbers and locations of airports, they showed that 20 strategically placed “sentinel airports” worldwide could detect outbreaks nearly as quickly and efficiently as a network involving thousands of airports. The larger network was just 20% faster but cost much more.<br/>