By Kristina Fiore
Source Medpagetoday
While the CDC’s recently launched wastewater dashboardopens in a new tab or window reports levels of influenza A, a team in Texas is getting far more granular in its wastewater monitoring.
The team at the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute (TEPHI) in Houston can detect H5N1 specifically — and it can even pick up potentially concerning genetic changes that could provide an early warning about adaptation to humans.
That kind of surveillance could sound an alarm well before standard symptomatic surveillance like emergency department visits or hospitalizations, which would only pick up an H5N1 outbreak after it’s already spreading in people.
Read more https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/110169