The CDC announced it would expand its airport surveillance for different pathogens.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will increase its airport surveillance for respiratory infections, said statements from the federal agency and a private partner on Monday.
What It Entails
The private firm, Ginkgo Bioworks, said that it is expanding its work with the CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program “to test for more than 30 additional priority pathogens, in addition to SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes COVID-19.
It then described the program as a “flexible, multimodal platform that consists of three complementary approaches of sample collection from arriving international travelers at U.S. airports, including voluntary nasal swabbing, aircraft wastewater, and airport wastewater sampling to enhance early detection of new SARS-CoV-2 variants and other pathogens, and fills gaps in global surveillance.”
What It Will Test
The other pathogens the company said it will test for include multiple influenza strains as well as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Neither it nor the CDC listed listed the others.
“The expansion of the Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program to flu, RSV, and other pathogens is essential as we head into fall respiratory season. The TGS program, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic, acted as an early warning system to detect new and rare variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and will do the same for other respiratory viruses going forward,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of the CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch, in the statement.
The travelers program was introduced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to detect COVID-19 variants and other pathogens via a nasal swab and wastewater collection sampling.
It allowed for the “early detection of the SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.2.86 entering the United States within days of its global identification,” the CDC said, referring to a COVID-19 variant that was found over the summer of 2023. “As the infected traveler had originated travel in Japan, this finding also informed the public health community that the new variant had also spread to Asia.”
