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Wastewater-based epidemiology. Basically we track infectious diseases in wastewater, and the results guide public health decisions.
As someone who is doing disaster response consulting for healthcare and public health: I fucking love you guys. You make my job sooo much easier.
Seriously.
The surveillance you folks do is pretty much indisputable and far more incorruptible compared to everything else we do, in healthcare especially.
Very often you are my "discussion ending gun" when decision makers endlessly want me to prove their (flawed) point of view. A "nope, here are validated wastewater based numbers, you are wrong" is extremely satisfying sometimes.
Thanks folks!
Love to hear it! 2 years ago I had no idea that I'd be working with wastewater but here I am now!
Anyone out here reading this, write to your senator about increasing funding to public health!
How does one get into that line of work?
Great question! For the US, you will need a degree in Molecular Biology/Microbiology or a Medical (Laboratory) Technologist. You'll then either need to live near the city where one of the few private companies that do wastewater testing ar e(my case), or live near a public health lab that does ww. Pretty much all state public health labs do it, but city/county level varies immensely. For the government route, look at APHL or NACCHO to find information on your local public health labs. There are a few universities that also do ww testing, for example I know University of Illinois, University of Missouri and Michigan State are all doing a bunch of wastewater work.
Feel free to DM me if you want more information.
Thanks for helping make sure I don't shit myself to death. I assume you help with that.
Actually COVID is one of the most used tests they do, at least around here. But you can do things like drug use, cancer epidemiology (for some cancers), etc. as well - and that is incredibly helpful from a public health point of view.
Because it's just like with Covid - we can't get proper data from patient sided tests because we can't test everyone. And even if we could,not everyone would.
But everybody poops/pees. And guys like OP interpolate from that.
The government is stealing our poop!1!!1
As Philpo said, we mainly do covid, but we can do Norovirus, which is a common GI virus that can give you the shits.
Thank you for your service! One of the best things to come out of the pandemic IMO.