The United States has a health-care system that is terrible and getting worse. It also has a health science system that is the best in the world and about to be dismantled.
The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House seems likely to collapse American health science, with consequences as disastrous for the rest of the world as for the approximately 340 million Americans in the U.S. Canada may be able to soften the impact here, but it will not be easy.
Comments closed✉️ Send letters to municipal councillors to voice your support for wastewater monitoring. Use our online tool to send emails.
Comments closedThe Ontario government abruptly ended its wastewater surveillance program earlier than planned this summer, despite having funding in place until the end of September and being warned that the move could leave gaps in crucial information for public health, internal documents indicate.
The government pulled the plug at the end of July on the globally praised program that, at its peak, covered about 75 per cent of the province.
The program, overseen by the Ministry of the Environment, provided an early warning signal to health officials about the spread of COVID-19, influenza, RSV and other infectious diseases, based on wastewater testing.
Documents obtained through access to information by the Ottawa Citizen indicate that the province’s hasty decision last spring to end the program came before Ontario’s Ministry of Health had even begun negotiations with the federal government about taking over wastewater surveillance.
Comments closedCOVID-19 is surging in parts of North America and Europe, and even played a role in ending the presidential campaign of 81-year-old Joe Biden, who was infected for the third time last month.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Ontario government shut down its early warning system to detect COVID and other emerging diseases.
Doctors, citizens and researchers are calling the decision to kill the province’s wastewater disease surveillance program both wrong-headed and dangerous. Ending the program will make it harder to track and thwart viral outbreaks, they say, and thereby increase the burden on Ontario’s understaffed hospitals, which experienced more than 1,000 emergency room closures last year.
“Pandemics do not end because science has been muzzled,” Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a well-known Toronto physician and clinical researcher, told the CBC.
In emails to politicians, more than 5,000 citizens have demanded restoration of the program, with little effect.
Comments closedFor the past three years, Alexandra Johnston has started her work day by reaching for the pickaxe in the trunk of her car.
It is her tool of choice for prying open manhole covers – a task she demonstrated with practised ease last week while on a tour of her wastewater sampling regimen in Toronto.
Wearing a surgical mask and gloves, Ms. Johnston dragged the heavy cover aside, then grabbed hold of the fishing line secured underneath. After hauling up a few metres of line, she displayed her catch: a dripping wet tampon she had placed there the day before.
Her teammate, Claire Gibbs, quickly moved in with a prelabelled plastic bag to capture the sewage-laden sample. Using scissors, Ms. Gibbs deftly snipped the line, sealed the bag and stowed it away in the trunk as part of that day’s delivery.
Comments closedMark Servos is going back to studying fish.
After more than four years of testing wastewater for traces of COVID-19, the University of Waterloo fisheries biologist and his team that spans 12 universities will take their last samples next week as the country’s largest wastewater network officially disbands.
The Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks has terminated the program as of July 31, removing one of the last reliable trackers of the virus’s spread in communities across Ontario.
Comments closedComments closedAnother blow to understanding the spread of COVID-19 is now slated to happen on July 31. That’s when funding ends for Ontario’s extensive wastewater surveillance program. It’s a technology that can detect viral particles up to seven days before people develop symptoms. It costs $15 million annually to check 58 sites throughout Ontario. But the cost of losing this hard-won technology is far greater. No longer having its data means that hospitals, long-term-care facilities, schools and communities will lose critical advanced warning of a potential outbreak. That gives them less time to prepare with masks, air filtration and vaccines.
York Region stands to lose reliability in its warning signs for population-wide COVID-19 and influenza cases as provincial wastewater surveillance ends, public health said.
The Ontario government announced it is ending the program, which allowed public health units to track COVID-19 in wastewater sampling sites across the province, on July 31.
York Region associate medical officer of health Dr. Sarah Erdman said the tool was very useful to help inform public health decisions.
“Given tighter testing eligibility for COVID-19 and influenza, wastewater surveillance provided helpful information about the burden of disease and community transmission among the general population,” Erdman said. “It also provided an early warning of surges ahead of an increase in cases and hospitalizations; without wastewater data, York Region will be unable to reliably obtain these estimates moving forward.”
Comments closedOttawa Public Health wants to collaborate with local partners to look for ways to continue wastewater monitoring after the province cuts funding to the program next month.
At its meeting this week, the city’s board of health passed a motion directing Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches to write to provincial and federal partners to find ways to continue the wastewater testing work that’s being done at the University of Ottawa.
Earlier this month, Ontario announced that by the end of July, it will scrap the program for sampling wastewater to monitor levels of COVID-19 in the population. The program began in 2020 and is funded through the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.
Comments closedThe Ottawa Science Policy Network (OSPN) is concerned with the decision of the Ontario Government to cancel the Wastewater Surveillance Initiative (WSI) in Ontario. This cut of $15 million per year employs researchers, and offers significant returns for public health and safety.
The Wastewater Surveillance Initiative was adopted in January 2021 which led to a team of groundbreaking and internationally recognized work led by scientists at Ontario universities and research institutes. Ontario is a world leader in this field of wastewater research; tracking the impact of COVID-19 on communities through wastewater has helped shape public policy decisions and informed Ontarians of risks within the population. This funding not only provided the necessary means to track COVID-19 levels within the population but was further expanded to screen for Influenza, RSV, and M-Pox. Elizabeth Payne, a correspondent for Ottawa Citizen notes that wastewater surveillance at the start of seasonal RSV prevented 295 pediatric hospitalizations and 950 medically attended hospital visits, saving Ontario $3.5 million.
As of July 31st 2024 the Ontario government will no longer be investing in the Wastewater Surveillance Initiative, mentioning a key reason being that the Federal government will be expanding their program through the Public Health Agency of Canada. However, this leaves research groups and graduate students who rely on Ontario funding in a precarious position as the future of their funding remains uncertain.
Comments closedImagine, if you will, a system of disease surveillance that doesn’t rely on expensive and painful tests. It does not require us to get swabs stuck up our noses, needles poked into our arms, or even to answer banal questions about symptoms. Instead, this system asks us to go about our regular day, sleeping, waking, eating, and … defecating … exactly as we would normally. In this system, heroic nerds — out of sight and out of mind — scoop and test samples of sewage in order to tell us whether disease rates are either concerning or tolerable.
Now imagine that shortsighted policymakers decide to defund such a surveillance system, just as its worth and pioneering quality are being celebrated worldwide.
Ontario’s infectious disease wastewater testing has been among the very few bright spots in an otherwise spotty COVID pandemic response. Absent a robust active surveillance system, which would involve regular random testing of large numbers of people for a variety of diseases — such as COVID, Mpox, RSV and influenza — scientists have relied on four sources of data to measure the extent of infection in our populations: hospitalization and mortality rates, the occasional testing of people who show up sick at some hospitals (what we call “sentinel surveillance”) and wastewater testing.
Of the four, wastewater is the only method that captures nearly all cases, especially asymptomatic infections or those not serious enough to seek medical attention. With the closing of COVID testing centres and the lack of availability of at-home rapid tests for COVID and other diseases, wastewater levels have been perhaps the best metric for informing the general public about current infection risk. And that information is critical for those who need to make daily exposure and socialization decisions to protect themselves and others from infection.
Comments closedTwo weeks after the Ontario government announced it would scrap its wastewater surveillance to monitor COVID-19, health officials in Peterborough may pay to keep the program running locally.
The $15-million program was launched in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to assist in monitoring the level of COVID-19 in a population. Funded by the Ministry of the Environment, the program is run by universities and research sites across the province.
The program is expected to end on July 31, coming on the heels of an expanded federal testing program. The province says the shutdown will “avoid duplication” with the federal program.
However, Peterborough Public Health’s medical officer of health Dr. Thomas Piggott says the federal program won’t reach the city and area. He called the province’s decision “deeply disappointing.”
“Peterborough would be left out. We know that the data here does not follow the same pattern as Toronto or Ottawa, we’re halfway between,” Piggott said Thursday. “And we have a very different pattern of transmission.”
Comments closedA researcher in Sudbury, Ont., says he’s disappointed the province is ending its wastewater surveillance program to track COVID-19 and other viruses in municipal systems.
“I would be lying if I said that I don’t feel sad to let the people go,” said Gustavo Ybazeta, a researcher at the Health Sciences North Research Institute.
Ybazeta said six people work at the lab, testing local wastewater for COVID-19 and other viruses like influenza and even sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and chlamydia.
While they will continue to conduct research on ways to monitor for viruses in wastewater, losing the surveillance program means at least half of those scientists will lose their jobs, he says.
Ybazeta said there are a dozen labs across Ontario that face the same fate.
Comments closedOntario to halt COVID wastewater surveillance program, June 4
The Ontario government’s plan to axe funding for wastewater surveillance is irresponsible. Wastewater monitoring is an essential public health tool that provides insights into the spread of SARS-CoV-2, influenza and other viruses. Without funding, we will lose important information about the prevalence of these significant health concerns.
The timing of the announcement is astonishing. We are faced with an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and new hyper-infectious subvariants are spreading rapidly. We will be hindered in providing an early warning system to inform everyone about new subvariants and emerging pandemic threats such as avian flu.
Comments closedThe Region of Waterloo’s most effective tool in tracking COVID-19 and other respiratory infections is ceasing operations at the end in July.
The University of Waterloo’s provincially-funded wastewater surveillance is ending, coinciding with the Ontario government’s decision to wind down its own program.
Wastewater surveillance was first introduced in 2021.
Mark Servos, the Canada research chair in water quality protection, has been spearheading wastewater monitoring at the University of Waterloo since 2020.
“We’re monitoring hundreds of thousands of people at the same time with the same sample,” he explained to CTV News. “There’s been hundreds of variants that we’ve been able to isolate.”
Comments closedDuring Question Period on June 6, 2024, Jeff Burch, MPP for Niagara Centre, asked some questions about the Ford government’s plans to eliminate Ontario’s wastewater monitoring program: “[…] with a serious gap in the federal government’s current ability to test wastewater in Ontario, why would this government abruptly cut this extremely low cost but highly valuable program?”
The government’s response was misleading. “The program is continuing through an expanded option with the federal government,” said Andrea Khanjin, Minister of the Environment, Conservation and Parks.
That’s not actually true. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is not taking over the program. The Ontario government is planning to shut the existing extensive program that has been developed over years, with 58+ monitoring stations and expert researchers at 13 Ontario universities. In its place, there will be a much more limited network operated by PHAC, covering just five cities in Ontario.
Comments closedWhen Ontario’s wastewater surveillance program is shut down next month it will be replaced by a significantly smaller federal program. That potential information gap worries some researchers and public health experts, especially at a time when COVID-19 cases are starting to tick up and avian influenza is spreading rapidly.
Ontario’s wastewater testing initiative, considered a world leader, currently tests wastewater for signs of infectious diseases including COVID, influenza, RSV and more at 58 locations across the province. The provincial government plans to pull the plug on the program at the end of July, saying it wants to avoid duplication with an expanding pan-Canadian wastewater surveillance program.
That new federal program includes plans to conduct wastewater surveillance in five Ontario cities. Four of the five cities have not yet been selected.
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