New tool lets you see flu, RSV activity in Milwaukee » Urban Milwaukee

There’s a new, easy-to-use tool to help inform the public about how common flu and RSV are and what steps can be taken to avoid contracting the diseases.

The Milwaukee Health Department launch a dashboard to track respiratory diseases.

The data comes from an increasingly used but unusual source: wastewater.

People, even those without visible symptoms, pass viruses in their waste, and measuring concentrations over time can reveal the prevalence of a disease in a community.

Using twice-weekly samples collected from Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage Districthis Jones Island and the South Shore treatment plants, a series of machines in the MHD laboratory of Zeidler Municipal Building extract and process samples to determine the concentration of various diseases.

The surveillance strategy has become popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as fewer cases have been reported with the increased availability of home tests and fewer people needing medical care.

During a tour of the lab, MHD officials said the data is valuable because it is collectively proactive rather than reactive. Using traffic light-like opening criteria, specific health interventions are suggested by the virus, ranging from regular hand washing (low) to avoiding non-essential indoor activities (high).

MHD epidemiologist Cait McCrory said it’s important to look for the trend line in the data rather than trying to spot individual data points.

RSV has been on a sustained upward trend since early November, while the spread of influenza is barely registering.

“We’re just now starting to see detections after a very long period of not having a lot of RSV detected,” McCrory said.

RSV prevalence has been changed to red (high). COVID-19 has declined from a late summer high, but is again on the rise.

“Fortunately, we’ve had a mild respiratory season so far, but we’re starting to see uptake,” the lab director said. David Payne.

MHD began testing samples for COVID in the fall of 2021. It tested internally for RSV and influenza, divided into influenza A and influenza B, to validate its results for several months before releasing the data.

Payne said he expects more agencies to follow suit in adding more disease types.

But MHD could add even more diseases. They could also further synthesize the samples to determine specific strains of viruses.

The lab director said the technology exists in the MHD lab, but it would mean an additional cost. The effort, so far, is funded by grants. “It’s still not a trivial expenditure of time or money,” Payne said.

After a sample arrives at the lab, senior microbiologist Julia Zimmer he said it takes about six hours total to get a result. That includes technicians, including Zimmer, who wear protective gear when handling samples. The final step involves a state-of-the-art machine that uses a digital PCR process to detect the concentration of RNA of a specific virus in a tray containing more than 600,000 individual wells. MHD was able to purchase the machines, with funding related to COVID-19, for about $35,000 each and can now use them to test for a variety of viruses.

People who use dashboard it is recommended that you do this from a desktop computer. And users must choose whether they want to see data from the Jones Island or South Shore treatment plant, although MHD officials said they don’t expect the trend lines to differ. However, the data cannot be combined, McCrory said, because Jones Island processes wastewater from the combined sewer system, and the inclusion of stormwater often causes concentration levels to be lower.

Want to see what’s happening in more cities? The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is operating a COVID-19 wastewater dashboard with data from several cities.

Photographs

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