NEW YORK— Wastewater testing does a good job at detecting mpox infections, U.S. health officials said in a report Thursday that bolsters a push to use sewage to track more diseases.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers found that over the course of a week, there was a 32% likelihood the tests would detect the presence of at least one person infected with mpox in a population ranging from thousands to millions.
Amy Kirby, who oversees the CDC’s wastewater surveillance work, said initially they didn’t know if the tests would work for a rare infection like mpox.
Whole cities can be watched from a single sample, said Joshua Levy, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in California who has studied wastewater monitoring and develops related technology.
“Almost every kind of virus that we’ve gone looking for is detectable,” Levy said.
This approach to disease tracking rose to prominence in 2020, when health officials began testing wastewater for genetic evidence of the coronavirus. It has grown into a mainstay of the CDC’s COVID-19 tracking as fewer nasal swab test results are reported.
In 2022, the CDC began working with a small group of cities to also look for polio in wastewater. That same year also saw a new effort to look for mpox, previously known as monkeypox, which erupted in outbreaks in the U.S. and other countries.
In the new study, the CDC looked at wastewater samples from 89 sites in 16 states, taken from August 2022 through May 2023. When mpox DNA was detected, the researchers checked cases reported by doctors “to basically see if we were seeing the same thing,” said the CDC’s Carly Adams, the lead author of the report.
It not only worked, the approach appears to be more sensitive for detecting mpox than COVID-19, CDC officials said. CDC officials, however, cautioned it is difficult to do head-to-head-comparisons, because of differences among germs and how well doctors are diagnosing and reporting cases of various diseases.
The agency also plans to start tracking germs that are resistant to antibiotics. And Kirby said by early next year the agency would start monitoring some food poisoning bugs.
“Wastewater surveillance is outperforming everyone’s expectations,” Kirby said. “We are really excited to see where else we can apply this new tool to help us understand disease in communities.”
