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Las Vegas, Nevada – First, it was COVID-19 that pushed some Las Vegas scientists down the sewers.
Well, it’s monkeypox.
After all, what goes into your toilet can tell you a lot about the diseases that are prevalent in your area.
This is how scientists at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas know how prevalent the monkeypox virus is, even before the health department.
Scientists can detect COVID-19 in wastewater weeks before someone tests positive
They were among the first in the country to study human feces to detect cases of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus before they were officially reported in the region.
They’re doing it again with monkeypox as the number of cases is over 14,000 nationwide.
Dr Edwin Oh, an associate professor at the UNLV School of Medicine, said it was the second country in the country, after San Francisco, to detect monkeypox using a wastewater monitoring program.
“An individual can be asymptomatic for about 3 to 17 days,” Dr. Oh said. “During this time, we won’t be able to see lesions in individuals. But if we look at the wastewater, we will be able to detect the virus there.”
Will monkeypox become an ‘established STD’? Why one infectious disease expert thinks so
Dr. Oh leads the UNLV Wastewater Monitoring Program.
He and his students concentrate in places with many people, such as schools, bars, shelters and hotels.
They use automated machines to pull samples from sewers.
Then return to the lab for analysis.
“That’s the conversation we have to have now, and not necessarily wait until we have 70,000 or 7 million infections before we start doing anything.”
They expect virus volumes to increase in the Las Vegas area next month.
“We have a sense of déjà vu again with COVID-19 in that we have an infectious disease that is circulating,” Dr. Oh said. “We don’t know much about it, but with a program like this we can at least track where this virus might be originating in different communities.”
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Current, CDC reports most cases 2,744 in New York and 2,663 in California.
Wyoming is currently the only state with zero reported cases.