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The same principle has been tested around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic to determine the prevalence of the virus regardless of clinical cases, and was added in India. The SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), run by the Indian government, has been tracking the emergence. of new variants of the virus, fearing that they may pose a new threat. Based on this idea, efforts are being made to expand a cost-effective framework and equipment to create an early precautionary formula for the outbreak of pathogen-induced diseases through domestic wastewater analysis in cities and cantons.
Rakesh Mishra, director of the Tata Institute of Genetics and Society in Bangalore and a member of the Alliance for Pathogen Surveillance Innovations (APSI)-India, said the system, once operational, will be able to provide timely data to management. prepare the necessary infrastructure to manage a scenario like the one we have witnessed with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Wastewater surveillance is key to understanding pathogen dynamics in cities. Without timely information, it is unimaginable to formulate effective actions. By just spending a few billion rupees, we can prepare a formula to detect a full spectrum of pathogens for an entire year for a city,” Mishra said.
If all goes according to plan, Indian cities deserve to have near real-time information on the presence of pathogens responsible for common infectious diseases such as swine flu, dengue, and Japanese encephalitis. This early caution formula has the potential to not only help identify outbreaks, but also track the effectiveness of public fitness interventions, such as pandemic-imposed lockdowns.
APSI includes think tanks such as the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), municipal corporations, hospitals, and other medical industry players operating in 4 nodal cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Delhi-NCR. The consortium has been active since July 2021, which is mainly run to detect new SARS-Cov-2 variants and measure viral load at the population level to detect infection hotspots. Although Covid-19 is no longer a public health emergency, APSI monitors SARS-Cov. -2.
LS Shashidhara, director of the NCBS, said that as a component of the APSI, they are working on identifying sampling sites, determining the frequency of sampling, laboratory strategies for detecting viral and bacterial pathogens, and implications in relation to clinical prevalence. of those infections. . . ” We are also creating high-quality but inexpensive kits so that environmental monitoring can be done by the public health government across the country,” he said.
Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Chief Commissioner Tushar Girinath showed this progression and said modalities for other diseases were not yet finalized. He said that the unity government had proposed that, as a component of the national fitness mission, the first such laboratory should be built for this. The goal is to build it in Bangalore before it is built in other cities.
By reading samples taken from other sewage treatment ponds, the city government can detect the presence of diseases such as swine flu, dengue, and Japanese encephalitis virus.
The APSI, funded through the Rockefeller Foundation, works together with INSACOG.
Shashidhara said that all the knowledge collected about SARS-Cov-2 is still shared with the respective cities, although no variants of fear have been detected in the entire population since vaccination.
As a component of APSI’s work, cities are running to measure antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in 18 cities in India and the measurements are soon expected to be standardized through the National Centre for Disease Control of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and implemented nationally.
Mishra said: “We explore what pathogens are provided there through the genetic material, whether it’s DNA or RNA. We will be told what types of AMR genes exist and what their signature is. He explained that thanks to this, they should know the type of resistance that the microbes have developed and its relative quantification. He explained that through periodic testing it is possible to compare whether the presence of a certain AMR is increasing or decreasing.
Over the years, antimicrobial resistance poses a public health risk that leads to higher mortality rates. The World Health Organization warned in November 2023 that 10 million deaths would occur each year worldwide until 2050 and could deplete the global economy by up to a hundred trillion dollars. . India is the country with the highest number of drug-resistant pathogens.
Similarly, in Jaipur, a group of scientists led by Sudipti Arora, deputy director of the Dr. B. Since January, it has been following the trend of the presence of AMR in wastewater.
“When we read wastewater samples, we come across a diversity of microbes that can cause disease in an entire community. By reading more, we can learn how pathogens respond to antibiotics and how resistant they become,” Arora explained. By exercising, they can supply doctors with applicable data on antibiotics that will no longer be effective at the population level.
Since 2021, Arora and his team have been on several foreign projects, adding the Asia-Pacific Network for Wastewater Surveillance for Covid-19 funded through the Australian government and the University of Wollongong.
During a training in Nagpur in January 2021, researchers from the University of Nottingham studied several wastewater samples and discovered the presence of rotavirus, norovirus from urban samples, and zoonotic viruses such as chikungunya and rabies. Lately he’s researching how mathematical models of synthetic intelligence can be used to expecting long-term disease outbreaks discovered from routine data collected in cities.
Each week, the HT Urban Affairs team tells you a story about where we are and how it affects the way weArray