Precision Health - Bangalore

After successfully completing 12 months of city-wide SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance in Bangalore (May 2021 to April 2022) under the name  Precision Pandemic Health Surveillance  the platform started to explore the potential of wastewater surveillance for the detection of new pathogens, which are an existing and emerging concern for the city. With rising (then) cases of Monkeypox in India and the high disease burden of Influenza A, Influenza B, and H1N1, integrated disease surveillance initiative was launched in August 2022 to test these pathogens, along with SARS-CoV-2 with a goal of using wastewater-based epidemiology where it can be scaled beyond the current pandemic and integrated into governmental surveillance and response mechanisms.  To read more about the above diseases, please visit  here .

The team actively work with the local municipal corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike; BBMP) and Bangalore Water Supply Sewerage Board (BWSSB) to help integrate the results into the public health framework. Other stakeholders, such as the Government of Karnataka or the Pollution Control Board, may also be interested in these findings.

Process and Methodology

Each wastewater sample is collected and tested for each of the aforementioned pathogens. 

• Sample collection sites - 22 sewershed sites spread across Bangalore city
• Sample collection frequency - Once a week for each site 
• Total samples collected in week - 22 samples. A single sample is collected, which is then tested for the presence of multiple pathogens.
• Sampling methodology - Grab sampling 
• Testing methodology for genomic sequencing (COVID-19) - Whole Genome Sequencing

As of October 14th, 2022, testing for Mpox (earlier Monkeypox) has been discontinued given global and national trends. Similarly, in late December 2022, the platform decided to pause testing for H1N1 and Influenza A & B untill the next monsoon season

Check out the city-wide and site-wise dashboards below for viral load and positivity rates for each pathogen

• The top right corner has the inline disease selection panel which will toggle between different diseases (only one disease can be selected at a time).
• Depending on the disease selected historical charts for the city level site positivity (in %) in the bottom panel, are available along with the indicators of Site positivity (in %) for the current week with comparision with the previous week can be viewed in the left top panel.
• Also the information regarding the testings are provided in the left bottom panel for understanding the calculation of the site positivity.
• If you are seeing this on mobile, you might want to click on the dashboard to open it in a separate tab

• Filter for the disease is available on the right top panel- You will see all sites on the map for the selected disease.
• Select the site on the left side to see it on the map or you can select positive/negative to see all positive sites on the map and filtered sites in the left panel based on this selection.
• Historical charts in the bottom panel, wherever applicable, are available- Depending on the disease selection for the final result (pos/neg) are available.
• For the selected site you can see all disease result information on the right bottom panel.
• If you are seeing this on mobile, you might want to click on the dashboard to open it in a separate tab

• This dashboard will help in identifying sites where the selected diseases are positive as well as sites with all diseases are negative for all the diseases (if any).
• You may select multiple diseases on the left side panel and whichever site is positive for all the selected diseases, you would see filtered sites on the map and right side panel.
• If you click on a site in the right side panel, the historical data for all diseases for that site would be available.
• If you are seeing this on mobile, you might want to click on the dashboard to open it in a separate tab

A day at the lab!

Partners & Contributors

For more information about the platform, please contact Shirish Harshe at shirish@catalysts.org or reach out to us on  Twitter  and  LinkedIn