After being stuffed into an airplane cabin for a long flight from overseas, you’re finally on your way home — but first, the government wants to stuff cotton up your nose.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is asking passengers returning from international destinations at four US airports to volunteer for its Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance (TGS) program.
Passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Boston Logan International Airport, Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC and San Francisco International Airport can now anonymously sample their nasal discharge as they leave the travel hub.
The new TGS pilot program is an expansion of a CDC initiative started in 2021 to test nasal swabs for the spread of COVID-19. Over the past two years, TGS has registered more than 360,000 air travelers, according to a CDC news release.
Now, the CDC will test for more than 30 pathogens, including flu, RSV and other respiratory viruses. In addition to nasal swabs, the CDC will take wastewater samples from aircraft to test for the presence of the virus.
“Expansion of the Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program to influenza, RSV and other pathogens is important as we head into the respiratory autumn,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of the CDC’s Travel Health Branch.
Passengers at JFK and several other international airports can volunteer to swab their noses to test for the presence of coronavirus and other viruses.ZUMAPRESS.com
“The TGS program, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic, acted as an early warning system to detect new and rare variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and will do the same for other respiratory viruses in the future,” added Friedman.
TGS detected the SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.2.86 from travelers entering the US within days of its global introduction, according to the CDC.
Because the infected traveler was from Japan, the discovery also alerted the public health community that the new variant had also spread to Asia.
The new testing program, which will last several months, will be carried out by private companies Ginkgo Bioworks and XpresCheck.
“The dream is that you run similar programs around the world in many, many places, so you get detection earlier than if someone shows up in a hospital,” Matthew McKnight, general manager of biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks, told CNN.
“The idea is, how do you prevent an outbreak? You catch something very early, which allows you to get it into the vaccine-making process more quickly. Today we don’t have as much early warning as we would like. And this is the first stage,” McKnight added.
The new CDC testing program is an expansion of an initiative started in 2021 to test nasal swabs for the spread of COVID-19. Getty Images
The current rate of COVID-19 hospitalizations included more than 15,700 hospitalizations per 100,000 people for the week ending Oct. 28, according to the CDC, which also noted the number of COVID-19-related deaths was just under 600 reported for the period.
And as the flu season began, for the week ending October 28, 189 cases of influenza were reported by public health laboratories.
“We’re interested in these fall respiratory pathogens,” Friedman told CNN. “We want to be able to sequence it, so we know the genomics of the strain.
“There are many blind spots around the world where there is limited testing and monitoring,” he added. “In general, our focus is on airports that are international hubs, and have flights coming from various international locations.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
