News

Analyzing wastewater for infectious diseases, whether at the state and local level or through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Wastewater Surveillance System, can help paint a clearer picture of the prevalence of flu, measles, or Covid-19 in a community. We need to strengthen the state and local surveillance capacity as well as the CDC's National Syndromic Surveillance Program, which provides access to ESSENCE, so communities have better tools to detect and act on early health signals — rather than relying solely on lagging case reports as outbreaks and costs escalate. If more proactive rubeola testing of those exposed had been promoted in low German, the language the Mennonite community speaks, and made widely available to everyone as an alternative for them to prevent the spread of measles during their gatherings in Gaines County before symptoms appeared, transmission could have been blunted. But if we free the data — empowering state and local leaders, and ultimately, the public — we can make health information as routine and useful as your phone's weather app.