About the platform
The Precision Health platform marries robust scientific evidence and community voices and contributes to accurate evidence-backed communication that communities and policymakers understand. This enables communities and city municipalities to plan ahead and be prepared. The platform makes an arch difference – by bringing together data scientists, geospatial data intelligence companies, eminent academicians, laboratories, research institutions, local municipal agencies, associations of clinicians, and public health agencies to become true partners of and for the communities speaking a language that is stripped of jargon – but contributing towards evidence-based health communication that the communities gain from.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the way in which we can leverage the benefits of technology for public health surveillance, understanding disease evolution patterns, and for predicting the short-and-medium-term trajectory of the infection for improved disease management.
The surveillance platform works on institutionalizing environmental surveillance as part of government response and policy actions. The platform has worked towards supporting the city municipal governments in understanding the trends of new COVID infections and has also initiated pilot studies to monitor other pathogens of pandemic proportions, antimicrobial resistance, Influenza A, Influenza B, H1N1, Mpox, etc.
Vision
Our vision is to bring environmental surveillance for public health in the state and national level public health system through research, advocacy, and scale-up initiatives, data modeling and communication
How does wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 work?
Wastewater based surveillance which gained prominence during the COVID pandemic, emerged as an effective tool for monitoring the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in populations. Based on the fact that this virus is first detected in feces than it is in blood, routinely monitoring wastewater (sewage) in strategic points has proved to be an effective tool that provides early warning signals of citywide infections and the pattern of viral load trends over a specified period of time.
It enables local government bodies to implement public health strategies based on the data that emerges from the citywide surveillance, and improves efficiency of implementation of containment measures and resource usage.
The precision health platform shed light on the scope of wastewater surveillance and its extension beyond SARS-CoV-2 to cover antimicrobial resistance and surveillance of other pathogens. The platform has adopted an Integrated Disease Surveillance approach to seek solutions to global public health challenges posed by other pathogens like influenza, monkeypox and other pathogens of concern. The first of its kind surveillance has already started in Bangalore
We follow the The European Commission guidelines and quality standards for surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewaters