In this latest opinion piece by Dr. Farah Ishtiaq, Principal Scientist, TIGS in the Nature India, she suggests that India must scale up wastewater analysis for health surveillance.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the value of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) — also known as wastewater or environmental surveillance — as an effective population-wide monitoring technique. Such mapping captured viral shedding by people with or without symptoms of the coronavirus disease.
Wastewater testing helped identify COVID-19 hotspots almost a couple of weeks before clinical data could.
Read the full article here