The district calculates a monthly “flush index” that can help identify visitor numbers and what infectious diseases, like COVID-19 and measles, may be in the county.
But now, the district, the Summit County Health Department and a public health laboratory in Salt Lake City have partnered to expand its testing for the state’s first wastewater metagenomic study. District director Mike Luers said it will help examine the health of the community.
“In a nutshell, this is where the wastewater samples are sent to the laboratory, and all of the genetic material, the bits and pieces of the RNA and DNA are sequenced, and the goal is to look for pathogens, antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and other potentially harmful microbes,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” April 22.
He said so far, the county is “looking good.”
Metagenomics is the study of genetic materials in specific samples. Luers said it is like putting together a complicated puzzle.
“Think of a very large box, say, the size of your house, filled with jigsaw puzzle pieces,” he said. “However, each piece in the box is from a different puzzle. Now the task is to assign each piece of the puzzle to a specific puzzle. So you go to the repository, and you compare each piece to a repository that has millions and millions and millions of pieces, and you come up with a unique sequence so you can make a match.”
The six-month study will collect information about what diseases are in the area, not just specific illnesses the district has tested for in the past.
Summit County Health Department Epidemiologist Nancy Porter says the study will be especially helpful to identify illnesses popping up earlier or staying longer.
“We've seen a kind of a slower rollout for RSV,” she said. “And so that's something that normally is in the winter, but we've been seeing an extended season. It kind of shifted a little bit.”
She said wastewater studies help officials warn residents about what’s going around and how best to protect themselves. They also allow the health department to notify hospitals about the diseases to watch for in patients.
Luers said recent improvements in technology and genetic material sampling have made examining large samples of data possible, and more affordable.
“The genomes of most pathogens have now been sequenced, and collectively, all of those genomes have been placed in a worldwide genome repository, so that if you run a sample and you want to know genetically, is this associated with, say, polio, you can go to that repository and it matches,” he said.
Luers said each monthly test is about $250 to look at the hundreds of pathogens. The departments will split the cost and determine how to proceed after the six-month trial.
