May 9—The initiative, created in partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will regularly collect combined wastewater flows from international arriving flights using an automatic sampling device and send them off to a laboratory for testing for emergent strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.
"As we know from the COVID-19 pandemic, pathogens can spread quickly across the globe, impacting travel and trade," said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of CDC's Travelers' Health Branch, in a statement. "Testing of airplane wastewater can provide early detection of new COVID-19 variants and other pathogens that can cause outbreaks and pandemics."
The program, limited to arriving flights at the International Terminal, is part of the government's early warning system for detecting new variants and began expanding recently in the wake of a COVID-19 surge in China. Scientists have long called for the screening of wastewater from toilet tanks on arriving airplanes as an early warning system for detecting new variants.
"It's a little gross when you start thinking about it," said Katelyn Jetelina, a consultant to the CDC. "But these are really long flights and we would expect the majority of people would go to the bathroom."
The airport previously supplied wastewater samples from its treatment plant to UCSF to help identify new COVID-19 variants. The new program will be administered by the Boston-based biosecurity company Concentric by Ginkgo.
SFO Airport Director Ivar C. Satero said, "This latest effort represents the most targeted approach to identify, monitor and ultimately mitigate COVID-19 variants."
Studying the amount of virus found in wastewater began early in the pandemic in some places and has become an increasingly widespread surveillance tool across the United States during the past three years as official coronavirus case counts have become unreliable because of the widespread use of home test kits.
"Biology doesn't respect borders, and airports and other ports of entry are critical nodes for monitoring the spread of pathogens," said Matt McKnight, a general manager at Ginkgo Bioworks.
Such testing has been used elsewhere. Recently, Canada announced an expanded wastewater pilot program, and Belgium said it would test wastewater from airplanes coming from China during the outbreak there earlier this year.
The airport screening program is based on an unfortunate reality, according to Friedman. "Travelers ... go across the globe quickly and they can get and spread infectious diseases really fast," she said.
Scientists said as the virus continues to evolve it is critical to keep searching for new variants.
The coronavirus is like a predator stalking humanity, said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, and "the predator adapts to the prey."
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