Fed’s multimillion-dollar poop-picking program is expanding, has international ambitions

Waste is a terrible thing to waste.

The U.S. government is expanding its program to collect poop and thinks picking through the nation’s feces is key to ensuring national security by helping officials spot and stop the next pandemic.

The Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program is expanding efforts at airports to detect more pathogens and increase its government funding. The program’s director says a supranational governing body is needed to coordinate poop collectors worldwide.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s surveillance program already gathers waste from international air travelers landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Washington Dulles International Airport and Boston and San Francisco airports.

Officials started wastewater surveillance to look for outbreaks and new variants of COVID-19 and are expanding their scope to include other viruses, such as influenza.

Dr. Cindy Friedman, founding director of the CDC’s program, said research from Northeastern University has shown that the U.S. government can buy three months’ worth of early detection capability, critical for infectious diseases such as COVID-19, if 10 to 20 countries participate in the wastewater surveillance.

Dr. Friedman said at a Ginkgo Bioworks conference in April that she supported a major European effort to create a global wastewater consortium to oversee governments’ human waste surveillance programs.

“We definitely need global cooperation and supranational leadership because, really, it’s in all our best interests,” she said. “The early detection piece, and whatever mitigation and public health actions come from that for whatever pathogen, really can help avoid the costly border closures, they can help avoid travel and trade disruptions, which is in everybody’s best interest.”

CDC spokesman Dave Daigle said the government has spent more than $60.3 million on the program since 2021. The program gathers samples from planes’ wastewater, airport wastewater sampling devices and travelers’ nasal swabs.

Taxpayer spending on the program is doubling as the endeavor expands. Mr. Daigle said nearly $19 million was added early this year to the program’s contract for its second-year allocation, up from approximately $17.7 million.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotechnology company, has partnered with the U.S. government on the program. It said in March that the genomic surveillance efforts would soon operate at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Miami International Airport.

Mr. Daigle said the government’s efforts to dig through dung have included only four of the busiest international airports in the U.S.: John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

“The frequency of new outbreaks around the world reminds us every day that persistent and strategically focused biosurveillance is paramount to ensure readiness and rapid response,” Matthew McKnight, Ginkgo Bioworks general manager, said in a statement in March.

Government officials hope a global network of wastewater surveillance will enable pandemic forecasting, similar to how meteorologists forecast hurricanes.

Northeastern University said last year that it received $17.5 million from the CDC to take a lead role in the Epistorm project.

Epistorm’s website said Northeastern, Ginkgo and eight other entities are participating in the project contracted with the CDC.

The project is part of $262.5 million that the CDC is spending over five years on outbreak analytics and disease modeling, according to the Health and Human Services Department’s website documenting government grants and a CDC announcement.

The CDC, its partners and foreign governments say more genomic surveillance is necessary worldwide. In March, the European Union announced plans to create an international system of wastewater surveillance at airports and other strategic locations to set up an early warning system for health threats.

The resulting GLOWACON, or Global Consortium for Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance for Public Health, is collaborating with the CDC, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others.

Growing international genomic surveillance may not sit well with privacy-conscious travelers, but China’s restroom surveillance technology is perhaps more likely to disturb the huddled masses yearning to pee free.

In April, China-based filmmaker Christian Petersen-Clausen documented health-checking urinals across Shanghai in a series of posts on X.

Mr. Petersen-Clausen said he paid a small fee after using one of the urinals and soon received medical results on his phone that showed he lacked calcium. He acknowledged having privacy concerns about sharing his health data but said on X that “the convenience is unbeatable.”

The U.S. government’s program is more discreet. It collects wastewater from planes rather than from airport terminals.

The Biden administration intends to use its collection protocols, which are less invasive than nasal swabs, to avoid passenger delays.

The CDC appears willing to move on if the wastewater surveillance efforts prove ineffectual.

“There are some really good use cases for airplane wastewater surveillance, community wastewater surveillance, and all these innovations that have come out of the pandemic, but we should never be doing it just to do it because it’s a shiny new object,” Dr. Friedman said at the April conference. “We really need to know that it has public health value.”

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.