The Government Wants to Surveil Every American’s Poop
Every American #EveryAmerican
COVID-19 has taught the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) many things, including how to track our poop. Now, the CDC wants to expand upon what it’s learned and potentially build a national wastewater surveillance system.
During the pandemic, wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance systems popped up quickly throughout communities in the U.S. to follow the spread of the coronavirus and any uptick in new variants. That’s because our waste included signs of the virus. To build on that effort, the CDC teamed up with the Department of Health and Human Services to commission a report from the National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on how a national system of wastewater surveillance could work.
The new report offers a vision for a national system designed to track pathogens and detect new ones, and says the system would need funding and collaboration to prove equitable and effective. Of course, if the federal government tracks citizens through waste purportedly for health reasons, that opens the door to an entirely new world—one that not every community will likely want to join.
Local communities started forming their own wastewater surveillance during the first year of COVID to better understand the movement of infections in their region. But those systems were often spur-of-the-moment tracking decisions that didn’t connect to a larger grid. The CDC believes the ability to track the poop of the entire U.S. is the way to go.
Even after forming the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) in October 2020 to centralize the burgeoning surveillance efforts, it remained largely a hodgepodge of labor, focused on only about one-third of the U.S. population—those living near major urban centers, according to the New York Times.
Still, the report says, even a limited NWSS was successful during the pandemic. From the Times:
Wastewater data helped local health officials determine whether infection rates were rising or falling in a particular community. In some instances, especially when testing was limited, wastewater proved to be a useful early indicator of a surge, with levels of the virus in wastewater beginning to rise days before the official case numbers did.
Wastewater surveillance also helped experts track the arrival and spread of new coronavirus variants. In the Bay Area, for instance, scientists found the Omicron variant in local wastewater before clinicians detected Omicron infections in patients.
An expanded, high-fidelity national system, then, could track all sorts of byproducts from the country’s human waste, merging data from areas across the nation to key regions—such as airports in major cities—to spot trends early and understand pathogens aplenty.
The goal, of course, is for the government to become… flush with surveillance data. (Sorry, had to.)