It has been consistently demonstrated that wastewater surveillance only enhances traditional surveillance, and often outperforms it when it comes to early/timely outbreak or surge detection.
In this case, since traditional surveillance is not really systematically occurring, and wastewater surveillance is relatively low-cost and easy to implement, it makes a lot of sense to me to go ahead and deploy it strategically.
Recently, Marc Johnson... said he was told by the agency not to use a virus assay he'd created for the purpose of tracking H5N1 outbreaks. The reason? Johnson said officials told him it would just add to the confusion.
Johnson said that if the assay had been in widespread use earlier this year, the spread of bird flu through the nation's dairy herds could conceivably have been stopped, or at least slowed down.
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