Testing for deadly diseases is a plane waste

MAJOR airports are intercepting and analysing the waste from planes to provide a “true early warning” of any dangerous new arrivals.

Covid is just one of many pathogens including polio, ebola and yellow fever that can be detected in airline sewage.

Among the early adopters was Thailand, which is just a three-and-a-half hour flight from Wuhan. The country found the first Covid-19 case outside China on Jan 13, 2020.

“We got the idea from our quarantine centres and hotels during the pandemic,” said Dr Rome Buathong, director of international communicable disease control at the ministry of public health’s port and quarantine unit.

“We thought, if it works there, why don’t we test the material from aircrafts? People on long-haul flights have to go to the toilet.”

The samples are analysed in a lab inside the airport for diseases including Covid, yellow fever, West Nile virus and – most recently – polio. In many cases, results acted as an early warning system, alerting officials to new hotspots.

Testing transnational waste from aircraft toilets is only just starting. Experts say it has the potential to be a “true early warning” system for future pandemics.

San Francisco International Airport became the first in the US to adopt the surveillance technique last May

Because the team is only able to gather samples from five to 10 flights per day, they target specific planes arriving from countries where variants were known to be spreading.

But t here are l i mits to t hese wastewater programmes. The most significant is toilet use – it only works when people actually go to t he bathroom on board.

Prof Kevin Thomas, director of the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Queensland said: “[Health officials] may not be able to differentiate travellers with connecting flight itineraries, which may affect the ability to detect the origin of an outbreak.”

“[So there’s a] potential issue with carryover of a signal between flights,” Prof Thomas added.

‘We thought if it works in quarantine centres then why don’t we test waste material from aircrafts?’