With the support of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative* is launching a new wastewater surveillance programme which uses genomics for early infectious disease detection.
Genomic sequencing is a powerful new tool that can quickly and accurately detect infectious pathogens. Wastewater is a low-cost and unobtrusive approach for collecting specimens. When combined with genomics, it provides a picture of what underlying pathogens might be circulating in a community. The approach has potential to be of highest-value in lower-resource settings where clinical surveillance systems face challenges and where disease risks are the highest.
“Wastewater-based genomic surveillance is a potential early warning system for outbreak detection” says Assistant Professor Vincent Pang from the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was able to detect disease signals 1-2 weeks before a surge in symptomatic cases infected by new variants were reported in the healthcare systems.”