NYS wastewater surveillance system receives award

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10)---At the Wadsworth Center in Albany, wastewater samples from around the state are being tested for diseases.

"It’s a powerful tool," explained Dr. Kirsten St. George, Chief of Viral Diseases at the Wadsworth Center." It’s actually been in use around the world for decades for other purposes. Here in America, it came into high use during COVID to monitor COVID."

In the years since the pandemic, wastewater surveillance at Wadsworth has expanded to test for other diseases such as polio and influenza. According to St. George, this surveillance can detect symptomatic and asymptomatic diseases circulating in communities before an outbreak starts.

"It can give a one week, and even up to two week advanced warning of an uptick in hospitalizations for COVID for example. Which is very helpful for a hospital to be able to prepare for a surge in inpatient traffic."

So how does it work? The team at Wadsworth showed Capitol Correspondent, Jamie DeLine, how they test for influenza A by concentrating wastewater. From there, genetic material is extracted and molecular tests are done. St. George said this also helps to detect the disease level, which is important.

"Especially once we’ve gone in with mitigation actions from our epidemiology team— are they working? Are they bringing the level down? Are we reducing this agent or is it still spreading in the community? Or have we eliminated it? So these measures are very important and the digital PCR chemistry is extremely accurate at doing that."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have named six Centers of Excellence throughout the United States. New York State’s wastewater surveillance program is now one of them.

"It comes with responsibilities. We we are assigned a jurisdictional area for the northeast United States, and we are responsible for sharing our expertise and methods and knowledge and training skills with those other areas around the northeast of the state."