Singapore Disease Testing Helps Fill the Gap Left by US Funding Cuts
Wastewater could offer clues to the next pandemic.
Several times a year, a dozen or so health professionals from across Southeast Asia spend a week in Singapore examining human excrement. They scoop sewage out of manholes and bring it back to a bright, sterile lab at the city-state’s environmental agency, where they concentrate the wastewater, dribble it into test tubes and evaluate it for pathogens. At these training sessions, organized by Duke-NUS Medical School—a leader in infectious disease research—they learn how to extract genetic materials that might indicate the presence of viruses.
The aim of the workshops is to train scientists from the region to identify disease outbreaks and stop them before they can spread. At the end of the weeklong program, the participants head home, where they’ll pass their newfound knowledge on to colleagues. “The training helps equip countries with a skilled workforce to prepare for future pandemics,” says Vincent Pang, an epidemiologist at the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness.