Durango has become a watchtower for infectious diseases.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment designated the city as a wastewater sentinel surveillance site in its evolving efforts to monitor communities around the state for early warning signs of problematic contagions.
The development comes as Colorado reorganizes how it monitors wastewater statewide. With the well of federal COVID-19 relief funding running low, Colorado dialed back its statewide surveillance program in favor of a more targeted model that was implemented Aug. 1.
CDPHE started its Wastewater Surveillance Program in August 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kayla Glad, CDPHE spokeswoman, said in an email to The Durango Herald.
She said Colorado’s surveillance program is funded through July 2027 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The money is for the testing of wastewater samples, as well as interpreting results and tracking trends, and acting as a National Wastewater Surveillance System Center of Excellence to assist states in building and enhancing their programs by sharing Colorado’s experiences from the last four years,” she said.
Now, Santa Rita Water Reclamation Facility in Durango has been chosen to continue to monitor wastewater for traces of COVID-19, enteroviruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV’s) and influenza, said Laura Rieck, spokeswoman for the city’s Public Works Department. The data will be representative of pathogen activity in Colorado’s southwest region.
CDPHE calls its new targeted wastewater testing model a sentinel surveillance system. It identified 20 wastewater treatment plants around the state for continued monitoring, and the city of Durango made the list.
Glad said each site is testing wastewater for the same pathogens.
Rieck said 13 of the 20 sentinel sites are located across Colorado’s 10 all-hazard and emergency management response regions. Three more wastewater plants are in large population centers such as the Denver metro area and four wastewater plants are located in high-tourism destinations, including Telluride.
Most of the sites were chosen because COVID-19 activity at them correlated with smaller communities in the same region. But that isn’t true of high-tourism locations. CDPHE added high-tourism to its list of population centers to monitor, Rieck said.
Durango is representing the southwest region while Telluride will represent San Miguel County and a hot spot for tourism, she said.
She added CDPHE still has an emergency sampling system on deck, ready for deployment if a rapid health response is needed in the face of a new microscopic threat.
Glad said wastewater surveillance protects public health in a noninvasive, cost-effective way by detecting “illness circulating in a community from everyone who contributes to a sewershed.”
“It does not rely on people seeking care or getting tested. Wastewater surveillance, when used in conjunction with other measures of disease burden, can help us evaluate trends of disease within a community,” she said.
Rieck said the city currently takes wastewater samples twice weekly in the health department’s statewide Wastewater Surveillance Program. When the program was dialed back July 31, many wastewater sites across the state were no longer asked to sample their wastewater for COVID-19. But Durango and other sentinel surveillance sites will continue testing twice a week for COVID and other diseases.
Sites that stop testing at the end of the month will be able to voluntarily resume testing should a public health emergency emerge. Rieck said it is likely those facilities would participate because it would be at no cost to them and would benefit public health.
The state will pay for couriers to transport samples from Durango’s wastewater facility to Denver for analysis, she said. The data will be reflected on CDPHE’s online COVID-19 wastewater dashboard.
Transporting wastewater samples is no joke. Rieck said protocol involves a chain of custody that is logged and recorded.
“With any ... wastewater samples, we have to have a chain of custody, and that could be from anything containing viruses or biological materials to heavy metals,” she said.
Wastewater handlers and couriers use what are called sanitary zones, marked and taped containers that wastewater samples are stored in, that are used to take samples from a treatment facility to the lab. She said if a seal is broken before the sample is analyzed in the lab, CDPHE will contact the city and inform it another sample is needed.
cburney@durangoherald.com
