Imagine, if you will, a system of disease surveillance that doesn’t rely on expensive and painful tests. It does not require us to get swabs stuck up our noses, needles poked into our arms, or even to answer banal questions about symptoms. Instead, this system asks us to go about our regular day, sleeping, waking, eating, and ... defecating ... exactly as we would normally. In this system, heroic nerds — out of sight and out of mind — scoop and test samples of sewage in order to tell us whether disease rates are either concerning or tolerable.
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