Monitoring wastewater from international flights for pathogens would be a useful way to get ahead of the next pandemic or even a biological threat from abroad, scientists say.
Researchers from Northeastern University show how such an early warning system could work in a paper published Feb. 12 in Nature Medicine.
The article on pandemic monitoring says networks of up to 20 “strategically placed” airport sentinel sites in locations including New York, London and Dubai would provide timely situational awareness of respiratory disease outbreaks and shorten the time of first detection of their international dissemination.
“The point is to set up a monitoring system that tells us about the potential introduction of pathogens at a very early stage of an outbreak in the rest of the world,” says Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor, one of the paper’s co-authors.
“We don’t want to be blindsided by knowing that something bad is happening only when there are already tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases like it was for COVID,” he says.
