Avian flu detected in wastewater from 10 Texas cities | Hacker News Reader

Avian flu detected in wastewater from 10 Texas cities

cidrap.umn.edu

93 pointsgeox41 comments

They do not mention which cities due to requests from officials. So they masked them like “West Texas City A” and list the exact population count. I’m assuming would be pretty trivial to tie back to the actual city.

Another interesting point is that it was 10 out of 10 cities they’ve tested. So the amount of Texas cities is likely way higher.

They do provide enough information to identify the cities. You just have to read the actual paper and check their disclosures. I found it relatively easy to determine which two cities in my region were sampled.

I agree that 10 out of 10 allows the conclusion that it is pretty much everywhere. It also supports the conclusion that it is not actively transmissible between humans, yet.

These numbers actually only cover the period from March to July so current data could be different.

Most likely cities based on my reading of the report and then asking a computer model to verify (I grew up in TX)

    Houston – Largest city in Texas (South Texas)
    Dallas – Major city in North Texas
    El Paso – Major city in West Texas
    San Antonio – Major city in South Texas
    Austin – Central Texas hub
    Fort Worth – Large city in North Texas, close to Dallas
    Corpus Christi – Major coastal city (South Texas)
    Lubbock – Large city in West Texas
    McAllen – Important city in South Texas (Rio Grande Valley)
    Arlington – Substantial city in North Texas, near Dallas

I only checked a few before determining that all were easy to find if you looked at the report. With that said I think your list is close to correct but there is more than one incorrect.

You have to use the supplemental appendix from the paper [0] to figure it out. There are 23 samples, some of which come from the different treatment plants in the same city so that there are 10 cities represented.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2405937

The West Texas city (4 samples) is undoubtedly El Paso.

One of the North Texas cities is Wichita Falls.

I believe the other North Texas city is Lubbock.

There are four East Texas cities.

There is one Central Texas city. Three samples were taken and based on reported population served at the sample sites the city will either be Austin or San Antonio.

There are two South Texas cities.

So my list is

Wichita Falls - North Texas Lubbock - North Texas

Both have excellent exposure to agricultural operations and lie along migratory bird flight paths.

El Paso - West Texas

This is the only city in West Texas large enough to have a wastewater treatment operation to serve the reported population numbers and it is also in an area with excellent exposure to agricultural operations.

Austin/San Antonio - Central Texas

This is a toss-up between these two since it could be either based on the population size reported for the wastewater treatment site and it is probably Austin based on designation as Central Texas city.

If San Antonio is considered a South Texas city then it will be one of the two South Texas sample locations. It makes sense for San Antonio and Austin to both be tested so it is likely that this paper places San Antonio in South Texas. I always considered it Central Texas (where I grew up) since it was just a short ride down I-35 and Laredo felt a lot more like South Texas. I'm probably wrong and it is indeed a South Texas city.

It's hard to guess the East Texas cities without digging into demographics and GIS data.

I suspect that Houston counts as East Texas though I always break things down differently since I lived there for a while. I consider it to be Rectal Texas. Just kidding, maybe.

It is likely that one of the East Texas cities sampled is Tyler since it is smack-dab in the middle of poultry country. Houston, classed as an East Texas city would be another. The other two could be suburbs of Houston or smaller towns in deep East Texas where there are a lot of cattle and chickens raised.

> It also supports the conclusion that it is not actively transmissible between humans, yet.

Sorry, I'm not following. How does a high level of prevalence show a lack of virality?

because we are not seeing a high level of hospitalization or deaths.

Not seeing high level of hospitalization due to H5N1 and the human cases that are reported do not share a common source genome I think is how they conclude that. Basically the humans that have contracted it and reported symptoms do not get it from a common source and there is no evidence of human to human transmission in the cases that are reported.

Ah yea, this makes sense. Thanks.

Lubbock, Amarillo

The article suggests it's likely from cattle. A small number of people exposed to cattle have been reported as having gotten sick with it but the opinion in the article is there isn't evidence of substantial numbers of people being sick with it.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's an inconclusive piece that seems to be trying to reassure the public that "Everything's fine!" even though no one knows if it's fine or not.

>Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

It kinda is when you're talking about public health epidemics though. There would be a ton of hospitalizations reported if a substantial number of people were getting it, which we don't currently see.

I can think of at least two infections that are probably widespread and underreported in the US. Plus, in recent years, there's a quiet little Hepatitis A epidemic in the US that the CDC is actively downplaying.

I'm aware of the hep A thing because it probably started in the homeless population in San Diego County, California. I happened to be homeless and running a blog called The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide, though I had been out of San Diego County for over two years.

I was contacted by some online rag and interviewed via email while on route to bring off the street. They misgendered me and made up a quote while cloth.

But it made me aware of the issue. So I then watched over coming months as reports of it spread further north to Los Angeles etc and eventually across the nation.

I blogged about it a few times but one dirt poor female blogger with no traction is not well positioned to essentially shout down a health crisis cover up by the US government.

Then Covid hit and people had bigger fish to fry.

I probably still have one blog post up somewhere about the quiet little Hepatitis A epidemic but I know I posted about it more than once and then redacted it more than once. I have a long history of doing that while trying to figure out this blogging thing. I do that less these days.

"Overton Window" plus who has credibility in the eyes of the public plus government goals of trying to avoid panicking people etc -- insert some Russian joke about The News isn't always true and The Truth isn't always news or something along those lines (a play on words, as I understand it, though I can count to ten in Russian and might know TEN more Russian words).

I think it's really interesting that wastewater is a source of so much sheer information. I never knew before Covid that you could do public health surveillance against wastewater contents. I wonder how local you can make it — like does the data collection and analysis have to be "per city" or can it be "per neighborhood".

It's been used in Australia for decades, for public health monitoring (various pathogens) and estimating drug use etc.

It can be refined to "upstream of collection point" - what that means depends upon the wastewater sewerage map of the region in question, often estate developments will all pipe to a common outflow from that estate that then joins a larger wastepipe.

How that plays out in any specific city will depend on the utility map.

I think it can be done per waste water treatment plant.

If the scientists are motivated enough, they can trace a virus all the way to your place of business.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02996-y

One man’s trash is another man’s (data) treasure :-)

How long until the technology is cheap and small enough that municipalities sell access to the pipes out of each house, to data brokers?

I imagine in most cities it's illegal already to have a septic system if there is public sewage available.

There's an urban legend that if POTUS is travelling overseas, he craps in a portable toilet, so that enemy spies can't analyze his shit. But last time I looked there was only one website saying that this is the case.

Nowadays I've read that Putin does this too, but I'm guessing that's an urban legend as well.

Would it end up in the waste water eventually even if it was only going around in birds?

To quote Seinfeld, "It's all pipes!"

I guess it depends which wastewater stream was monitored, and if the municipality has different pipes for rainwater drainage Vs home sewage.

I'm assuming that would be somewhat unusual, I doubt that any of the water that gets in contact with farm animals is supposed to drain into the municipal water system.

Municipal water systems have a "sanitary sewer" line in addition to a stormwater line. I've no idea how this method of virus testing works, but I beleive you would take samples from the sanitary sewer.

That depends on system design. Older systems tend to be combined systems, unless they've been reworked to separate stormwater. If you live in or near somewhere that often has sewage outflows in heavy rains, chances are it's a city that urbanized before WW2 and has combined sewers.

Sanitary sewers also tend to be leaky, rain will result in surface water entering the sanitary sewers and larger flows into the treatment plants even if storm drains are routed elsewhere. You might get some filtration from soil though. If your city only very occasionally has sewage outflows in heavy rains, it's probably from ground inflows rather than combined sewers and there may also need to be a second trigger such as power loss.

Back to the original topic, I think the above is interesting but irrelevant. If your system is at risk of bringing in stormwater to screw up your measurement, you'd change where you're taking the measurement and/or be a little selective about when you take the measurement.

Lots of stormwater lines in Texas cities/suburbs are straight to water sources. Lots of PSAs and signs and what not about storm drains going to rivers and lakes and what not. They don't often hit a lot of treatment plants.

As a kid I had a lot of fun exploring the underground of the storm drains.

>Would it end up in the waste water eventually even if it was only going around in birds?

It's coming from cows, they produce a lot of waste water.

I may be over-cautious but I'm avoiding US domestic dairy products, apart from some milk that has been ultra-pasteurized

do you honestly think pasteurization does anything to prevent viral transmission

Yes, that's part of the whole purpose of pasteurization, there is ample proof that it is generally useful at that, and there is specific research showing that it is effective for avian flu. And that's just normal pasteurization, when GP said his potentially over-cautious approach is to only consume ultra-pasteurized milk if it sourced from the US.

https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...

okay I was under the impression that pasteurization only effected bacteria, and destroying virus required much higher temperatures, but looks like I was mistaken

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7361064/

Back in June some testing was done in UK based on samples from US.

https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_1078447_en.html

Let me introduce you to the "germ theory" of disease. It makes more accurate predictions about the world than other disease theories!

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/08/history-pas...

Yes, as per the FDA's own website[0]

[0]https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...

I'm struggling to think of definitions of these terms where this sentiment might seem coherent

Would love to see your sources to the contrary!

There was some earlier study showing that pasteurization does not destroy the flu virus entirely.

Going into winter, I wish we were more ahead of this. It might just be a repeat of swine flu, but I'd gladly pay $25 for an extra flu shot just in case.

In samples from March-July. Wonder why they just published this now?

"A report yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine details detection of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus in wastewater from 10 Texas cities during the same time period the virus was detected in Texas cattle herds."

Here's the letter to the Editor https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2405937

July to September is actually a pretty impressive turnaround by biomedical research standards. Many of my papers take a year or more. Just another reason to push for wider usage of preprints.

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