Wastewater study detects a large, silent wave in Bengaluru

Wastewater study detects a large, silent wave in Bengaluru

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Health

Context:

It appears that Bengaluru witnessed an invisible wave of COVID-19 that was far bigger than the third wave driven by BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron variants in January 2022. Based on 2,856 genome sequences from India posted on GISAID between December 1, 2022 and April 8, 2023, a team led by Dr. Rajesh P. Karyakarte, Head of the Microbiology Department at the BJ Medical College, Pune found that the XBB.1.16 lineage had grown from 9.3% in the first week of February to 79.17% in the first week of April

How wastewater surveillance is helping the COVID-19 fight

• People infected with SARS-CoV-2 can shed the virus in their feces, even if they don’t have symptoms. The virus can then be detected in wastewater, enabling wastewater surveillance to capture presence of SARS-CoV-2 shed by people with and without symptoms.
• This allows wastewater surveillance to serve as an early warning that COVID-19 is spreading in a community.
• It is difficult to test everyone who has COVID-19, but it is easy to take a single wastewater test and you will have effectively tested everyone who lives in a particular area.

National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS)

• In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC (Centre for disease control and prevention) launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) in September 2020.
• CDC developed NWSS to coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater samples collected across the country.

Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID)

• The GISAID platform was launched on the occasion of the Sixty-first World Health Assembly in May 2008.
• GISAID is a global science initiative and primary source for genomic data of influenza viruses and the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19.
• Headquarters: Munich, Germany
• In 2010 the Federal Republic of Germany became the official host of the GISAID platform and its database (named EpiFlu) providing sustainability of the platform and stability through its public-private-partnership with the GISAID Initiative to this day.
• In 2013 the European Commission recognized GISAID as a research organization and partner in the PREDEMICS consortium, a project on the Preparedness, Prediction and the Prevention of Emerging Zoonotic Viruses with Pandemic Potential using multidisciplinary approaches.
• Key role:
• The Initiative ensures that open access to data in GISAID is provided free-of-charge to all individuals that agreed to identify themselves and agreed to uphold the GISAID sharing mechanism governed through its Database Access Agreement.