A couple more articles on aircraft wastewater testing, one journal and one in media:
Shingleton et al: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10286959/ https://time.com/6286825/covid-19-variant-tracking-airports-cdc/
The journal article is from the UK Health Security Agency and considers the potential for wastewater testing as an alternative to individual passenger screening, applied to the example of SARS-CoV-2.
This is interesting from Nature on “supershedders” outlining data from a study back in 2021 in which people were deliberately infected with COVID-19 – a small number of individuals emitted much more airborne virus than the remainder. In fact, two of the 36 individuals were responsible for 86% of the total emitted virus.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01961-7
Zhou et al: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00101-5/fulltext
Some Airfinity headlines on disease outbreaks:
Cholera and measles significantly burden African countries while dengue claims lives in Asia and South America;
Number of avian influenza outbreaks in wild birds is likely to be highest ever in 2023;
Current HPAI epidemic has now affected more poultry than all previous epidemics combined;
75% of every new or emerging human infectious disease has come from animals;
7 of the 10 highest risk animal diseases have been reported in the last 1.5 years;
Animal vaccination is a successful strategy to eliminate public health threats and prevent extinction;
Despite promising efficacy data, many countries still ban vaccinations against H5N1 citing fear of undetected viral spread.
A total of five instances of wild polio have now been detected in Afghanistan in 2023, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Afghanistan.
This trend in hospital admissions for COVID-19 in the USA this year is interesting. XBB.1.16 (thought responsible for current waves in Asia Pacific) is growing rapidly in USA however this isn’t translating to a rise in hospitalisations, possibly due to warmer weather moving people to mix outdoors.
On a different topic: Detailed review study and meta-analysis from the Black Dog Institute in Sydney Australia, indicates that workplace mental health screening, alone, is probably not very effective at improving worker mental health – Strudwick et al: https://oem.bmj.com/content/early/2023/06/15/oemed-2022-108608
David Powell
IATA Medical Advisor