International | Where there’s muck, there’s data

How covid-19 spurred governments to snoop on sewage

Monitoring wastewater can help track diseases, drugs and even explosives

Old brickwork sewer tunnel with light from the turn. Underground river or old rainwater collector of the 19th century.

Sep 7th 2022

Nuhu amin is a medical researcher at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh. Later this month one of his colleagues will dig into a pit latrine in Cox’s Bazar, a refugee settlement in Bangladesh where 900,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims live. A sample will be extracted, refrigerated, and sent on a 12-hour bus journey to a laboratory in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. Once there, it will be tested for the presence of many different bugs, including cholera, typhoid and sars-cov-2, the virus responsible for covid-19. With aid from the Rockefeller Foundation, a big philanthropic organisation, Dr Amin plans for his team to repeat the process every week. That, he hopes, will give him insight into how covid-19 is spreading through the camp.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “What lies beneath”