With most of these cases, there is enough data to focus the search for a cryptic lineage within a specific population, but the decision to pursue an individual must be left to public health officials, he said. Johnson agrees and is clear that it’s not something that should be routinely chased. And so tracking back through the wastewater system to identify a person is not what the system is intended for,” Kirby said. It’s a community-level surveillance method. “Part of the power of wastewater surveillance is that it is inherently anonymous. “But we only know about the ones we can find, and we don’t know what the implications are, because we still don’t know who those people are.”įinding these people can help them get the medical attention they need and perhaps help researchers learn more about long COVID – but it will take co-ordinated public health messaging in local communities to raise awareness, as well as openness from members of those communities. “Best-case scenario is you find the person, they have long COVID but had no idea they had this infection, and you get them with a doctor who can get them on medicines that will actually give their immune system a bit of an upper hand, and they get better,” Johnson said. The only way to know for sure is to directly link the genetic sequence from a clinical test to the wastewater sample. These unique instances could be from people with long COVID, or they could be from an infected animal whose waste made it into the system. Wastewater surveillance is inherently messy, and lots of factors can interfere with interpretation of the data, she said. Johnson’s research has led him to the conclusion that humans are the primary explanation for the cryptic lineages.įor Kirby, some questions remain. “And it’s not what we’re seeing with these cryptic lineages.” “The signal we really look for is specific variants increasing in frequency in a community because that’s what happens at the beginning of a variant surge,” Kirby said. Right now, the cryptic lineages do not pose a public health threat, she said. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been following these developments closely but has not been directly involved in the work, said Amy Kirby, program lead for the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System.
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