Delaware Wastewater System Expanding Monitoring To Combat Illegal Drug Use
Following a surge in wastewater monitoring as a tool to combat the spread of COVID-19, a Delaware community will be expanding the practice to help with another one of the country’s most pressing health issues going forward.
“[New Castle] County Executive Matt Meyer first implemented the sewer testing in the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020,” WHYY reported. “Now, Meyer plans to use the same technology to track drug use, mining the wealth of information about public health that’s hidden in the county’s sewer wastewater.”
In addition to the benefits of wastewater monitoring demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, its use for tampering illegal drug use could help gain a more accurate sense of this problem than data points collected from the police, which can be skewed. It also might give police a tool to work more proactively with those susceptible to dangerous drug use.
“This gives us truly proactive data, to be able to go out into an area and say ‘Hey, this is where it’s happening,’” Lt. Allen Herring of the New Castle County Police Department told Delaware Public Media. “Let’s get out here before they ever get involved with police.”
And this Delaware wastewater system is not the only one looking more closely at sewage for clues about how substances like fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and nicotine are impacting public health.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, a California county is using the same wastewater monitoring program it used to track the coronavirus to go after another deadly public health crisis: opioids,” according to Reuters. “Local authorities hope the data could be beneficial in assisting prevention and intervention efforts. For example, if there is an abundance of opioids present in the samples, they could boost the distribution of Narcan.”
As more wastewater systems around the country put analytical tools to work, it’s possible that a new cutting edge of health science is now emerging.
To read more about how wastewater systems collect data about influent, visit Water Online’s Wastewater Measurement Solutions Center.