MIT Technology Review March 22, 2024
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
This week I have a mystery for you. It’s the story of how a team of researchers traced a covid variant in Wisconsin from a wastewater plant to six toilets at a single company. But it’s also a story about privacy concerns that arise when you use sewers to track rare viruses back to their source.
That virus likely came from a single employee who happened to be shedding an enormous quantity of a very weird variant. The researchers would desperately like to find that person. But what if that person doesn’t want to be found?
A few years ago, Marc Johnson, a...
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