PETALING JAYA: Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah has defended the health ministry’s move to run PCR tests on sewage samples from aircraft coming from China amid criticism on social media.
On Friday, the health ministry said all travellers arriving in Malaysia will have to undergo temperature checks for fever amid concerns over a surge of Covid-19 cases in China, adding that PCR tests on sewage samples from aircraft from China would be sent for genome sequencing if they were found to be positive.
In a Twitter post, a user with the handle @chrisdanielwong said “Tell me this is not true? We should be testing people (travellers) not their (sewage)!.”
In response, Noor Hisham, who was among those tagged in the post, attached a factsheet from Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA), calling it a “good read to understand”.
In the two-page document, the NEA said that as the Covid-19 virus may be found in stools or respiratory discharges of infected individuals, including those with mild or no symptoms, the testing of wastewater provides an indication of Covid-19’s transmission in the community.
The factsheet said that the monitoring of Covid-19 viral fragments in wastewater plays an important role in Singapore, having expanded from eight sites in May 2020 to 440 sites currently – including residential areas and town centres.
After first starting in workers’ dormitories in the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, NEA said wastewater testing subsequently expanded to student hostels, nursing homes, and residential sites – helping to reduce the risk of community transmission by facilitating early detection of Covid-19 cases in neighbourhoods.
It added that the focus of wastewater testing has shifted from early case detection to attaining situational awareness.
“The data from the testing alerts premise owners or operators of the situation, thereby prompting calibration of public health measures,” according to the factsheet.
Separately, a Reuters report on Friday stated that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants.
Citing infectious disease experts, the report said the policy will offer a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the United States than new travel restrictions announced this week by the US and other countries, which require mandatory negative Covid-19 tests for travellers from China.
It quoted Dr Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, as saying that travel restrictions, such as mandatory testing, have so far failed to significantly curb the spread of Covid-19 and function largely as optics. - FMT
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