Expansion of Airport Surveillance, Announced By CDC

Expansion of Airport Surveillance, Announced By CDC

It has been just revealed the fact that CDC made an important announcement regarding airport surveillance. Check out the latest reports about this below.

CDC makes important airport surveillance announcement

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will increase airport surveillance for respiratory infections, according to statements from the federal agency and a private partner on Monday.

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.”

Testing important pathogens

The company plans to test for various pathogens including multiple strains of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). However, the specific names of other pathogens were not listed by either the company or the CDC.

Dr. Cindy Friedman, the chief of the CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch, stated that the expansion of the Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance (TGS) program to include flu, RSV, and other pathogens is crucial as we approach the fall respiratory season.

The TGS program, which was initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic, served as an early warning system for the detection of new and rare variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and will also function in the same capacity for other respiratory viruses in the future.

The Travelers Program was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to detect COVID-19 variants and other pathogens through 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.”

You can check out more important details about the matter here. 

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