While polio has been
virtually wiped out around the world, BGU researchers and their colleagues have developed a new model to detect and
assess outbreaks and help eradicate it completely.
Their findings were just
published in Science Translational Medicine last week.
One of the obstacles to
the complete eradication of polio is the reintroduction of a wild polio virus
from an endemic country to a previously polio-free country. In 2013, Israel
experienced an outbreak of wild polio that was detected in the sewage through a
process known as environmental surveillance (ES). ES entails regular checks of
sewage or wastewater to test for polio. Even if a country eradicated polio
years before, wild poliovirus can sometimes be carried over from a neighboring
country. There are still three countries worldwide (Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Nigeria) where polio has not yet been eradicated and high percentages of the
population not yet vaccinated against it.
There are two ways to
assess a polio outbreak. One is to wait for a case of paralysis to be reported.
Environmental Surveillance is the other. However, until now, its sensitivity to
be able to assess the outbreak as a whole has been unknown and ES was therefore
not trusted (and thus not applied globally). Dr. Yakir Berchenko and his
colleagues developed a model that establishes the sensitivity of ES, and
moreover, shows it is in fact much greater than the alternative. By showing ES
is much more sensitive, outbreaks can be detected earlier, the extent of the
outbreak determined more quickly and accurately, and the termination of the
outbreak declared more definitively.
While the data is
derived from the Israeli case, the model is applicable all over the world.
Berchenko is a member of
BGU’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management. His coauthors
include Prof. Itamar Grotto from BGU’s Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health
Sciences and colleagues from the Ministry of Health, the Gertner Institute, Tel
Hashomer Hospital and Tel Aviv University.
Estimation of PolioInfection Prevalence from Environmental Surveillance Data; Y Berchenko 1, Y Manor 2,
LS Freedman 3, E Kaliner 4, I Grotto 4,5, E Mendenson 2,6, and A Hupper t3,6
1 Dept. of Industrial
Engineering and Management, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
2 Central Virology
Laboratory, Ministry of Health, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer,
3 Biostatistics Unit,
Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy Research, Tel-Hashomer
4 Public Health
Services, Ministry of Health, Jerusalem
5 Department of Public
Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
6 School of Public
Health Sackler Faculty of Medicine Tel Aviv University
DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf6786
