They do not mention which cities due to requests from officials. So they masked them like “West Texas City A” and list the exact population count. I’m assuming would be pretty trivial to tie back to the actual city.
Another interesting point is that it was 10 out of 10 cities they’ve tested. So the amount of Texas cities is likely way higher.
They do provide enough information to identify the cities. You just have to read the actual paper and check their disclosures. I found it relatively easy to determine which two cities in my region were sampled.
I agree that 10 out of 10 allows the conclusion that it is pretty much everywhere. It also supports the conclusion that it is not actively transmissible between humans, yet.
These numbers actually only cover the period from March to July so current data could be different.
Lubbock, Amarillo
The article suggests it's likely from cattle. A small number of people exposed to cattle have been reported as having gotten sick with it but the opinion in the article is there isn't evidence of substantial numbers of people being sick with it.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's an inconclusive piece that seems to be trying to reassure the public that "Everything's fine!" even though no one knows if it's fine or not.
>Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
It kinda is when you're talking about public health epidemics though. There would be a ton of hospitalizations reported if a substantial number of people were getting it, which we don't currently see.
I think it's really interesting that wastewater is a source of so much sheer information. I never knew before Covid that you could do public health surveillance against wastewater contents. I wonder how local you can make it — like does the data collection and analysis have to be "per city" or can it be "per neighborhood".
It's been used in Australia for decades, for public health monitoring (various pathogens) and estimating drug use etc.
It can be refined to "upstream of collection point" - what that means depends upon the wastewater sewerage map of the region in question, often estate developments will all pipe to a common outflow from that estate that then joins a larger wastepipe.
How that plays out in any specific city will depend on the utility map.
One man’s trash is another man’s (data) treasure :-)
I think it can be done per waste water treatment plant.
There's an urban legend that if POTUS is travelling overseas, he craps in a portable toilet, so that enemy spies can't analyze his shit. But last time I looked there was only one website saying that this is the case.
Nowadays I've read that Putin does this too, but I'm guessing that's an urban legend as well.
Would it end up in the waste water eventually even if it was only going around in birds?
Municipal water systems have a "sanitary sewer" line in addition to a stormwater line. I've no idea how this method of virus testing works, but I beleive you would take samples from the sanitary sewer.
To quote Seinfeld, "It's all pipes!"
I guess it depends which wastewater stream was monitored, and if the municipality has different pipes for rainwater drainage Vs home sewage.
I'm assuming that would be somewhat unusual, I doubt that any of the water that gets in contact with farm animals is supposed to drain into the municipal water system.
>Would it end up in the waste water eventually even if it was only going around in birds?
It's coming from cows, they produce a lot of waste water.
I may be over-cautious but I'm avoiding US domestic dairy products, apart from some milk that has been ultra-pasteurized
There was some earlier study showing that pasteurization does not destroy the flu virus entirely.
do you honestly think pasteurization does anything to prevent viral transmission
Going into winter, I wish we were more ahead of this. It might just be a repeat of swine flu, but I'd gladly pay $25 for an extra flu shot just in case.
In samples from March-July. Wonder why they just published this now?
July to September is actually a pretty impressive turnaround by biomedical research standards. Many of my papers take a year or more. Just another reason to push for wider usage of preprints.
"A report yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine details detection of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus in wastewater from 10 Texas cities during the same time period the virus was detected in Texas cattle herds."
Here's the letter to the Editor https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2405937
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