Health Wanted: Ode to Sewers
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: The creation of modern sewer systems solved critical sanitation issues in growing cities. Today, wastewater can help researchers to detect and prevent disease outbreaks. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Marlene Wolfe, PhD, discuss the evolution of sewers and the role of wastewater surveillance in public health.
The takeaway: The evolution from unstructured waste disposal methods to modern sewer systems has prevented the spread of once-deadly diseases and enabled scientists to detect and prevent outbreaks through wastewater surveillance.
- The evolution of waste management was driven by increasing population density and its resulting public health challenges. Historically, improper wastewater management was a serious driver of cholera, typhoid fever, and diarrheal diseases around the world.
- John Snow’s work during the 1854 cholera outbreak in London was pivotal in establishing the link between contaminated water and disease. He is often considered one of the first to lay the foundation for modern epidemiology.
- Modern sewer systems were developed in response to public health crises of the 19th century, particularly to address outbreaks of waterborne diseases like cholera. These systems improved urban sanitation for many big cities, but they also often transferred the city’s waste, and diseases, to communities downstream.
- Today, sewers are not just for waste removal but are also increasingly used for public health surveillance. Wastewater surveillance allows researchers to detect pathogens spreading in communities and prevent larger outbreaks of diseases such as COVID-19 and polio.
The Interview
The guest: Marlene Wolfe, PhD
The key takeaways:
- Wastewater surveillance has been effectively tracking water-borne diseases like polio for decades. Recently, it has also been used to monitor diseases that are not typically spread through wastewater, such as COVID-19 and mpox.
- Wastewater surveillance has both benefits and challenges. It can capture data about underserved populations that might not have access to health care, but it also misses information from individuals who use septic tanks and are not connected to the broader sewer system.
- It is very difficult to predict exactly how many people in communities have COVID-19 from wastewater surveillance alone. People can shed different amounts of the virus and contribute different amounts of waste to the system. Researchers focus on identifying overall trends and are still developing models to calculate more precise estimates of case numbers from wastewater data.
- One benefit of wastewater surveillance is that it keeps people anonymous. This is especially important for diseases that may carry social stigma, like mpox, because wastewater surveillance can catch even trace amounts of diseases. Working with larger populations ensures that it is impossible to trace a pathogen found in wastewater back to its original source.
The Listener Questions
Can I get two shots in the same arm?
You can get two shots in the same arm. They should be at least one inch apart. You could also ask if they can do one of the shots in the anterolateral thigh muscle, which is the middle part of your outer thigh, if you’re worried about your arm being too sore, because that happens sometimes, particularly with COVID shots.
Hopefully, soon you won’t even need to worry about getting two separate shots. In June, Moderna announced that its phase 3 clinical trial of a joint COVID/flu vaccine elicited a higher immune response in people over 50 than co-administering separate doses, and they plan to submit it to the FDA for approval.
Should I drink Coca-Cola if I fall into a river with E. coli?
The PH of Coca-Cola is about 2.6 and the pH of your stomach acid is one, so Coke is not more acidic than your stomach and it’s not going to do a better job of killing bacteria.
One study from Turkey found that Coke has antimicrobial properties, but they studied it by putting Coke directly in Petri dishes of bacteria.
There are many things that will inhibit the growth of a bacteria or virus in Petri dishes, but that doesn’t mean it works in the human body. Drink a little soda after practice if you feel like it. But Dr. Pepper should not be your medical advisor, and if you start getting gastrointestinal symptoms, see a licensed provider.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
