Version 1
: Received: 7 May 2023 / Approved: 9 May 2023 / Online: 9 May 2023 (07:49:15 CEST)
How to cite:
Bivins, A.; Morfino, R.; Franklin, A.; Simpson, S.; Ahmed, W. The Lavatory Lens: Tracking the Global Movement of Pathogens via Aircraft Wastewater. Preprints2023, 2023050587. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202305.0587.v1
Bivins, A.; Morfino, R.; Franklin, A.; Simpson, S.; Ahmed, W. The Lavatory Lens: Tracking the Global Movement of Pathogens via Aircraft Wastewater. Preprints 2023, 2023050587. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202305.0587.v1
Bivins, A.; Morfino, R.; Franklin, A.; Simpson, S.; Ahmed, W. The Lavatory Lens: Tracking the Global Movement of Pathogens via Aircraft Wastewater. Preprints2023, 2023050587. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202305.0587.v1
APA Style
Bivins, A., Morfino, R., Franklin, A., Simpson, S., & Ahmed, W. (2023). <strong>The Lavatory Lens: Tracking the Global Movement of Pathogens via Aircraft Wastewater</strong>. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202305.0587.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Bivins, A., Stu Simpson and Warish Ahmed. 2023 "<strong>The Lavatory Lens: Tracking the Global Movement of Pathogens via Aircraft Wastewater</strong>" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202305.0587.v1
Abstract
Modern commercial air travel connects disparate human populations with the global airline industry transporting up to 4.5 billion passengers annually in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. While such connections are convenient for commerce and tourism, air travel networks can also be efficient distributors of infectious diseases such as influenza, SARS-CoV-1, hemorrhagic fevers, and more recently SARS-CoV-2 and monkeypox. During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health agencies used multi-layered control strategies including pre-departure testing and vaccination requirements, masking, post-arrival testing, and quarantine to manage the risk of COVID-19 transmission associated with air travel. Simultaneously, the surveillance of aircraft wastewater emerged as a promising new data source to screen for SARS-CoV-2 infections, including newly emergent lineages, among international air travelers. Herein, we review the potential of aircraft wastewater for public health surveillance. The known contributing population and flight itinerary combined with the highly concentrated waste stream and convenient sampling during routine lavatory servicing make aircraft wastewater a strategic opportunity for unintrusive surveillance of the global fluxes of human pathogens. We estimate for the cases of fecal- or urine-shed pathogens, sampling from 3,500 and 1,250 flights per week, respectively, would be required to survey 10% of all global long-haul flight passengers. In the case of the United States, achieving 10% coverage of all international arrivals would require sampling from 925 and 322 flights per week, respectively. Aircraft wastewater surveillance could also be integrated with network and infectious disease models to better inform traditional public health control measures during emerging epidemics. Given the tremendous potential for public good and the massive economic costs of epidemics, governments should consider international collaboration to create a global aircraft wastewater surveillance system.
Keywords
air travel; infectious disease; sentinel surveillance; wastewater surveillance; aircraft
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public, Environmental and Occupational Health
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
