A pilot study to correlate wastewater and clinical surveillance for hepatitis A in New York state

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a rapid expansion of wastewater-based surveillance in New York State (NYS). Pilot studies were initiated in 2023 to assess the use of this system for the surveillance of hepatitis A virus (HAV) and other pathogens of public health interest. A known cause of outbreaks in the US associated with contaminated food products and transmission between injection drug users, HAV is present in feces for weeks before the onset of symptoms. However, the use of wastewater surveillance as an early warning system has not been assessed outside of the outbreak setting. We compare clinical HAV surveillance with quantitative testing of wastewater samples for HAV RNA from four counties in NYS between September 2022 and November 2023, a period of relatively low HAV incidence. There was a significantly higher mean concentration of HAV RNA in wastewater from sewersheds in districts with reported HAV cases, relative to those without (267 vs. 21 gene copies per microliter, p < 0.05). For 91 % of HAV cases, HAV RNA was detected in the wastewater from the same county between HAV exposure onset and diagnosis, and new HAV RNA detection in wastewater occurred, on average, 41 days before case diagnosis. Our findings demonstrate that wastewater surveillance may provide early warning of case clusters at the county level in low-incidence settings and may allow for detection of otherwise missed asymptomatic or mild illness. Expansion of testing to include all sewersheds in each county may further improve the sensitivity for identifying locations for targeted HAV intervention.

Keywords: Digital PCR; Environmental surveillance; Hepatitis; New York; Wastewater.