A sampling team at a Pakistan site processing collects wastewater through the bag-mediated filtration system. PATH/Dr. David Boyle.
The world is on the brink of eliminating polio. But the highly infectious virus, which spreads through feces, has recently been detected in Israel, Malawi, Mozambique, Ukraine, and, the United States, and the United Kingdom for the first time in 40 years, providing evidence that gains are fragile. Even after infection, symptoms are typically slow to appear—which can allow poliovirus to circulate undetected for weeks.
With poliovirus shed in feces by the symptomatic and asymptomatic alike, environmental surveillance (also called wastewater-based epidemiology) is a powerful tool to help identify and control the virus. Because virus “shedding” begins soon after infection and often long before symptoms appear, sewage and wastewater provides a real-time view of trends in community infection.
“If the global community hopes to eradicate polio and other enteric viruses, we’ll need stronger environmental surveillance methods.”— David Boyle, Laboratory Director and Diagnostics Program Leader, PATH
Wastewater surveillance programs could be the next big public health innovation—thanks to PATH, they are already in use in countries around the world.
PATH is part of a team working on environmental surveillance of sewage systems, fecal sludge, and impacted surface water to monitor communities for infectious diseases such as polio and quickly provide insights into the circulation of the virus to inform public health decision-making.
PATH and partners have developed, validated, and commercialized a new environmental surveillance tool to assist in the global eradication of poliovirus.
Environmental surveillance can quickly provide insights into the circulation of the virus, potentially predicting peaks and identifying newly imported variants.
Achieving long-term global eradication will require a complex, sustained, and multilayered approach involving diagnostic tools, surveillance, vaccines, and a united, global effort toward a polio-free world.
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Local work, global support
Thank you to the many partners around the world supporting this work. Without you, innovative programs like these would not be possible.
Environment and Public Health Organization (Nepal)
Institute for Disease Modeling (US)
KWR Water Research Institute (Netherlands)
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (UK)
Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (Malawi)
Michigan State University (US)
Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (Australia)
The Aga Khan University (Pakistan)
Tribhuvan University (Nepal)
Tulane University (US)
Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)
University of California, Merced (US)
University of Washington (US)
Venthic Technologies (Greece)
Yale University (US)