According to U.S. health officials, Philadelphia and Oakland County, Michigan, have joined the small number of American towns that are checking sewage for traces of polio infections.
The villages will test their sewage for polio for at least four months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Communities in New York State started conducting tests earlier this year after a man outside of New York City was found to have paralytic polio.
Officials from the CDC claim that they have discussed commencing polio wastewater testing in additional regions. They are concentrated in areas with low polio vaccination rates and those where visitors had previously travelled through the polio-affected New York towns.
Identifying the virus in sewage, according to officials, can assist a city or county in accelerating and focusing immunization operations.
Wastewater has been utilized by health officials to monitor Covid outbreaks all over the world. The CDC is now getting coronavirus data from wastewater sampling from all 50 states. Commercial laboratories started checking wastewater for mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, this year.
Health officials in Houston and Colorado intend to start testing sewage for a number of additional health risks starting in 2019. These risks include bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, norovirus, and other bugs. According to CDC authorities, if the pilot test is successful, more extensive testing will be conducted across the nation.
