PORTLAND, Maine — According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 14,000 people in the United States have monkeypox.
Starting this week, the Portland Water District (PWD) will begin to test for monkeypox, influenza A, and RSV.
"They seem to correlate very well with what the public health officials are reporting for clinical cases [talking about COVID-19 sewage water testing], so we are confident [monkeypox testing] can be done," Scott Firmin, director of wastewater services at PWD, said. "We've gone to the wastewater scan site, and we've looked at other communities, other larger cities that are doing this, and they are presenting the data on a website, there are graphs, there are trends, so the information looks valid, and we are excited to be able to help provide that."
"In partnership with WastewaterSCAN, which is a collaboration between Verily and academic centers, East End Wastewater Treatment Facility staff will take three samples a week and ship it to Verily Life Sciences where they will test samples for the viruses that cause COVID-19, monkeypox, influenza A, and RSV," a Portland Water District spokesperson said.
PWD will also continue to test for COVID-19 through a program with the Maine CDC.
"Now with the availability of home test kits, I'll probably test at home and then report to work or I would call work and say I just tested positive and would be quarantined or stay home. Those results may not make it back to the CDC. The interesting thing about wastewater is ... Even asymptomatic people shed the virus or the COVID-19 virus, and we're getting a really good profile of the presence of the virus within the community," Firmin said.
Firmin explains that people infected with these viruses can shed the virus into the water that flows from their homes to the public wastewater systems.
Collecting samples and testing them will allow community members and health officials to track virus activity by looking for the virus in wastewater and its levels through periods of time, and it can depict an early sign of community trends for the specific viruses being tested for.
Wastewater, or sewage, includes water from toilets, showers, and sinks.
“Results from this project will help Maine CDC better understand the burden of these viruses in our community,” Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine CDC, said.
The results will be publicly available on the WastewaterSCAN website.
“We were pleased to be asked to participate in this program and expand our role in supporting public health and the Maine CDC. The expanded testing recognizes the importance and effectiveness wastewater surveillance has played in monitoring the pandemic,” Firmin said.