A new study from Rice University and the Houston Health Department shows that wastewater monitoring is an effective way to detect viral outbreaks in schools.
The study measured weekly levels of COVID-19 and influenza in wastewater samples from 51 Houston-area schools over a total of 17 months. It found that wastewater sampling data was reflective of infection rates in schools themselves as well as reflective of rates in zip codes where the students lived.
"This is basically supporting our overall finding that wastewater is an effective means of monitoring levels of infections at multiple different scales," said Dr. Lauren Stadler, principal investigator on the study and professor of environmental engineering at Rice.
The Houston Health Department has been using wastewater data to measure city-wide COVID-19 infection rates since the height of the pandemic in December 2020. However, experts say monitoring school-specific data could offer a valuable tool for detecting the spread of disease quickly, even when children are asymptomatic or underreport their symptoms.
"You don't see wastewater surveillance on the school level, so proving that it's effective and can be done is really exciting," said Dr. Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer at the Houston Health Department and professor of statistics at Rice. "This is an incredibly powerful tool that's exciting not just for the health department but also for schools and the nurses working in them because they have this new information that can help them control the spread of disease quickly."
She also says the technology is particularly practical since it can be collected without students and parents having the burden of testing and reporting positive cases themselves.
Hopkins said she hopes the technology will be adapted to detect not just COVID-19 and the flu, but also other common infections.
"Our hope is that we can rely on Rice to develop a whole suite of viruses to look at on a routine basis which we can then provide to the schools and to the school nurses, with the goal of limiting the spread of disease and keeping kids in their desks," she said.
Stadler said the list of diseases they hope to monitor in the future include things like antibiotic-resistant pathogens, Hepatitis A and various respiratory viruses.
Weekly reports on the city-wide and school level are available online at https://covidwwtp.spatialstudieslab.org/.
