Breakfast Webinar: Wastewater Surveillance as a Pandemic Management Tool

Hudson River Watershed Alliance Watershed Breakfast Series: March 11, 2021
Featured Speaker: David Larsen, Syracuse University

Dr. David Larsen is an epidemiologist working at Syracuse University with expertise in global health. Most of his career has focused on the surveillance, control, and elimination of malaria, and leveraging lessons learned in that disease system to other infectious diseases. During the Covid-19 epidemic, David has led efforts to scale a statewide wastewater surveillance program for coronavirus to improve health security and speed economic recovery. Wastewater screening, in municipal sewer collection systems and college campus collection systems, allows for rapid characterization of the geographic extent of infectious disease transmission, and can be leveraged to determine the prevalence of variants of concern. Dr. Larsen discussed wastewater surveillance in the context of health security and economic recovery, not only for the current pandemic, but also in preparation of the next.