{"id":35154,"date":"2022-08-25T10:46:33","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T15:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/?p=35154"},"modified":"2022-08-25T10:46:33","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T15:46:33","slug":"a-new-wastewater-monitoring-program-means-oklahoma-doesnt-have-to-rely-solely-on-testing-to-find-covid-and-monkeypox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/2022\/08\/25\/a-new-wastewater-monitoring-program-means-oklahoma-doesnt-have-to-rely-solely-on-testing-to-find-covid-and-monkeypox\/","title":{"rendered":"A new wastewater monitoring program means Oklahoma doesn&#8217;t have to rely solely on testing to find COVID and monkeypox."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; margin-bottom: 20px; border-radius: 6px; overflow: hidden;\"><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px;\" src=\"https:\/\/player.captivate.fm\/episode\/4c597f15-6225-4d70-81e3-d6fc9b91ba64\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless=\"\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s the first week of school at OU. In a lab \u2014 up on the ninth floor of one of the university\u2019s brick buildings \u2014 researchers are carrying out work that started back in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They\u2019re decked out: lab coats, safety goggles. Their gloved hands are inside white metal boxes, full of pipettes and tiny tubes.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dr. Kara de Leon is a microbiologist at OU. She\u2019s overseeing part of an expanded wastewater monitoring program. It\u2019s allowing academic researchers \u2014 like the ones in this lab \u2014 to work with public health agencies across the state to detect viral and bacterial outbreaks by testing sewage.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Samples come from about 20 cities across the state, taken at different sites \u2014 water treatment facilities, airports. De Leon says they\u2019re trying to get that up to 30.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That team is working with another one headed by OU civil engineering professor Dr. Jason Vogel.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He says the practice isn\u2019t new; it helped identify a polio outbreak in Israel in 2013. But it\u2019s new to Oklahoma.<\/span><\/p><p><b>&#8220;<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Oklahoma, we started in the summer of 2020 on the OU campus,&#8221; Vogel said.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The team collected samples from manholes outside of dorms to monitor spread among their residents. It\u2019s been growing since, and now they\u2019re developing a statewide program.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of course, monitoring across a city looks a little different from monitoring a specific residence hall. They still test manhole-accessible water, but they go to city treatment facilities too.<\/span><\/p><p>&#8220;I<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">n a small community that has 10,000 people, the treatment plant is still pretty representative of a relatively small population, whereas the largest treatment plant in Oklahoma City that we monitor drains 440,000 people,&#8221; Vogel said. &#8220;When we&#8217;re looking at a dorm, we may have been looking at 300 people. And so you can look at different populations\u2026 So that&#8217;s collected in the field. It&#8217;s refrigerated and it&#8217;s brought in under controlled conditions. And then we hand it off to Dr. de Leon&#8217;s lab. &#8220;<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There, step one is cleaning up the samples.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p>&#8220;I<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">f you think about things that people put down the drain, they vary substantially,&#8221; de Leon said.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s flushing the toilet, yes, but also dishwashers, laundry machines. And then there are industries contributing too.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">De Leon says the lab workers extract genetic materials from those samples, and then scan those genetic materials for about a dozen pathogens.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Right now, there is a lot of COVID in the water. That\u2019s easy to find. Vogel says that\u2019s not the case for all of the pathogens.<\/span><\/p><p><b>&#8220;<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Something that&#8217;s brand new, such as monkeypox \u2014 if there&#8217;s only a few cases in there, we may or may not be able to see it, depending on how many people are contributing to that,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If we have 100,000 people and there&#8217;s only one or two cases, that&#8217;s going to be hard for us to find that needle in a haystack. &#8220;<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He and de Leon say there is still work to do to refine the process and make it as accurate as possible.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But State Epidemiologist Jolianne Stone says the program has already proven helpful, especially with COVID.<\/span><\/p><p><b>&#8220;<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the ways that COVID wastewater testing was used was to look at where do we need to target testing or vaccination pods or, you know, maybe messaging to let them know that they might have high cases of COVID in their area,&#8221; she said.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This monitoring has one major benefit that other sampling, like PCR tests at the county health department, lacks.<\/span><\/p><p>&#8220;I<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">t doesn&#8217;t necessarily rely on individuals seeking out testing at a health care provider,&#8221; she said. &#8220;And in the era of moving to home testing, especially with COVID, we may not always get positive lab results to our agency.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">COVID data is skewed by home testing, monkeypox by misleading symptoms \u2014 such as appearing like herpes or other STDs \u2014 and some of the infections are transmissible without symptoms. That means these health officials need another way to find infections.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s the first week of school at OU. In a lab \u2014 up on the ninth floor of one of the university\u2019s brick buildings \u2014 researchers are carrying out work that started back in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit.They\u2019re decked out: lab coats, safety goggles. Their gloved hands are inside white metal boxes, full [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":35155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35156,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35154\/revisions\/35156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}