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Ottawa: Contact councillors — save our wastewater monitoring!

📣 Let municipal councillors know you want funding for wastewater monitoring to continue

✉️ Send letters to municipal councillors in Ottawa to voice your support for wastewater monitoring. Use our online tool to send emails.

Why take action? The funding for Ottawa’s wastewater monitoring program is currently set to expire in September 2025. Wastewater monitoring is an essential public health tool that provides insights into the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in Ottawa. We need an early warning system to inform everyone about the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 subvariants, influenza, avian flu, RSV, mpox, and other viruses.

People with disabilities, the immunocompromised, and other equity-denied groups rely on daily wastewater data to time risky activities such as medical appointments.

Please take a moment to voice your support for wastewater monitoring in Ottawa!

  1. Make sure your email application is active (e.g. Mail or Thunderbird).
  2. Click a button in the contact list below. It will create a message using the message template.
  3. Customize your message. Don’t forget to add your name and email address, and modify the wording of the message if you like.
  4. Click the send button in your email software.
  5. Repeat — click the button for the next person in the list. It’s easy to go through the list.

Note: For best results, use an iPhone or another smartphone. If a message isn’t created when you click or tap a button, you can try using a different device. This won’t work with Internet Explorer; use Firefox, Safari or Chrome instead. Issues with Microsoft Outlook have been reported.

📣 More ways to take action

✉️ Please fill out Ottawa Public Health’s five-minute Respiratory Surveillance Survey before May 9, 2025 to let them know that you want the wastewater surveillance program to continue.


Contact councillors in Ottawa

To:

List of contacts — Ottawa
Contact list

Cc:

  • Dr. Trevor Arnason, Ottawa Public Health, Trevor.Arnason@ottawa.ca
  • Ottawa Public Health – Epidemiology, OPH-Epidemiology@Ottawa.ca
  • Councillor Catherine Kitts, Chair, Board of Health, Catherine.Kitts@ottawa.ca
  • Catherine McKenney, MPP Ottawa Centre, cmckenney-co@ndp.on.ca

Subject: Save our science — protect Ottawa’s wastewater monitoring!

Message template:

I am writing to voice my support for the continuation of the City of Ottawa’s funding for our wastewater monitoring program. Ottawa’s hospitals and residents, including people with disabilities and immunocompromised people, need and expect continued access to this essential public health program. Please commit to continuing wastewater surveillance in Ottawa and extending the existing program beyond fall 2025.

Ottawa’s wastewater surveillance program is a vital early warning system for SARS-CoV-2, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and mpox, as well as emerging health threats such as measles and avian flu. As noted by Ottawa Public Health, wastewater surveillance is a near real-time and reliable indicator of community infectious disease transmission, and the program has received “overwhelming support” from Ottawa residents.[1] Particularly at a time when we can no longer rely on accurate health data related to outbreaks in the United States, it is important that we take responsibility for monitoring our communities for these emerging threats. Wastewater monitoring is the ideal intervention for this surveillance because of its low cost, its protection of the anonymity of residents, and its ability to rapidly detect the presence of new pathogens early on – long before cases are reported and exponential growth occurs.

At the institutional level, wastewater data supports the timely use of preventive measures to respond appropriately to health threats. For example, CHEO uses daily wastewater data to time public health interventions that keep vulnerable children out of emergency rooms, improving health outcomes and lowering costs to our already overly-burdened health care system. In Ontario, daily wastewater surveillance has enabled the optimization of public health interventions for RSV, preventing hundreds of children from being hospitalized. According to a recent analysis, wastewater monitoring allowed for accurate timing of the onset of RSV season in a dozen Ontario communities, providing savings of $2.1–$3.5 million during the first year and $13.7–$16.6 million over 1–3 years due to early RSV detection.[2][3]

At the community level, the data obtained through wastewater monitoring helps many vulnerable and informed Ottawa residents to better adapt to the varying levels of COVID-19 and the general situation regarding infectious diseases. People with disabilities, the immunocompromised, caregivers, and other equity-denied groups rely on wastewater data to time more risky activities such as medical and dental appointments, in facilities where universal masking has been dropped. Without Ottawa’s wastewater surveillance tool, we are more likely to avoid our regular routines and appointments because we are unable to appropriately assess our risk levels.

Of all the health programs available at the municipal or provincial levels, Ottawa’s wastewater surveillance is an example of a program that best epitomizes the core stated values of Ottawa Public Health of “equity”, “prevention” and “impact.” Losing this tool would be a loss to the whole community, and especially to the health institutions and equity‑denied individuals that use it the most.[4]

Please continue your support of Ottawa residents, including people with disabilities and immunocompromised people, by sustaining this important and popular health monitoring tool. Please act now to ensure that Ottawa’s daily wastewater surveillance program continues beyond fall 2025 without interruption. The cost of maintaining the program will be recouped many times over by enabling hospitals and residents to reliably assess community infectious disease transmission and to prevent many infections and hospitalizations.

I look forward to your reply.

Notes: [1] Natasha O’Neill. “Wastewater virus surveillance is coming back to Ottawa. Here’s how”. CityNews, October 4, 2024. https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2024/10/04/wastewater-virus-surveillance-coming-back-to-ottawa-heres-how/. [2] Elizabeth Payne. “‘I was shocked’: Ontario to cancel widely used wastewater surveillance program.” Ottawa Citizen, June 4, 2024. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ontarios-groundbreaking-wastewater-testing-program-will-be-replaced-by-a-significantly-smaller-federal-program. [3] Elisabeth Mercier, Nisha Thampi, Shen Wan, Bosco Paes, John Fullarton, Ian Keary, Barry Rodgers-Gray, Robert Delatolla. “P-1282. Saving Lives and Costs: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Wastewater Surveillance to Guide all infant prophylaxis in Ontario, Canada”. Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Volume 12, Issue Supplement_1, February 2025, ofae631.1463, https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofae631.1463. [4] Ottawa Public Health’s Strategic Plan 2023-2027. https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/public-health-services/ottawa-public-health-s-strategic-plan-2023-2027.aspx.

Sincerely,

[Your name and email address]