Central CA partnership monitoring Merced County wastewater for RSV, flu

MERCED COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) -- A Valley partnership is taking action to monitor and, hopefully, stop the spread of the flu and RSV.

Healthy Central Valley Together is now using wastewater to track this latest surge of respiratory illnesses.

Sewage surveillance can provide public health researchers a lot of information about viruses.

Several Central California counties have already been monitoring wastewater for COVID-19.

Recently -- public health departments, wastewater facilities and researchers started to are keep a close eye out for RSV and the flu.

"The virus gets shed into the wastewater before we even necessarily have symptoms," said Heather Bischel, an assistant professor at UC Davis. "So it can be detected pretty early."

Bischel and UC Merced assistant professor Colleen Naughton are leading the research effort.

"We try to see if the trends are increasing or decreasing," Naughton said. "We communicate that to public health partners, and it's available on a public website. So then they can communicate it out to the community and make recommendations, such as like indoor masking or getting those booster shots."

HCVT is focusing on Merced, Stanislaus and Yolo counties.

Wastewater samples will be collected three times a week, which gives enough data to notice a trend.

"That's really useful for public health departments because they can take that data, understand which communities are experiencing higher infection rates and ground truth that against other sources of data they have from hospitals and changing rates there," Bischel explained.

The first sample was taken December 1. Researchers hope to release data in a couple weeks.

The public can also monitor the virus on the group's website.