Marcel Levi6 January 2024, 03:00
During my Christmas weekend shift at the hospital, there were quite a few patients with a Covid or influenza infection. Sometimes we discovered this by chance when someone came for something else, but often the infection was the cause of a serious derailment of, for example, diabetes or chronic lung or heart disease. And then you end up in a hospital bed because of the virus. In some cases, the Covid or influenza itself was so serious that hospitalization was required.
Just for the sake of good understanding and without attaching any value judgment to the answer, we asked our patients whether they had taken the vaccination against influenza or coronavirus. 100 percent of the infected patients said that they had decided against it this time: because they did not believe in it, because of ‘vaccine fatigue’, or because they were scared by all the strange stories on social media. Even those over 80 or those with extensive chronic diseases had skipped the vaccination.
Data from GGDs, among others, shows that only half of eligible people have been vaccinated this year. You could see it as a complete failure of our public health education and preventive public health. A much more effective strategy is desperately needed.
We know from data from the RIVM that there is a lot of Covid and influenza around these weeks – and the risk of infection is therefore extremely high. After all, this institute samples all sewer collection points in the Netherlands three times a week. With this unique system, we are the only country in the world that knows exactly how much Covid is prevalent and where, because half of the people who are infected excrete the virus into the sewage water.
Ultra-sensitive testing methods allow you to use that sewage not only to monitor infections with the coronavirus, but also for other pathogens, such as polio, monkeypox or bacteria that are no longer sensitive to common antibiotics.
You can also measure concentrations of medicines in sewage water. For example, the RIVM showed that four times as much Viagra is flushed down the sewer than is issued by pharmacies – so the erection drug is probably often purchased illegally online. It is also interesting that the Viagra concentration in sewage water reaches peak values in the South of the Netherlands around Carnival.
Recently, addictive substances such as cocaine and ecstasy, as well as new and potentially dangerous designer drugs, have also been measured in the sewer. That is useful information to understand what is going on where in the drug circuit.
And the sewer can also reveal where and when higher concentrations of alcohol are flushed; and whether people in certain regions have more health-threatening substances such as high concentrations of heavy metals or cancer-causing chemicals in their bodies.
The sewer does not lie and provides a unique and fairly precise insight into what is going on in our bodies.
Marcel Levi is chairman of the board of directors of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Previously, he was CEO of University College London Hospitals and chairman of the AMC. He writes a weekly column for Het Parool.
Comment? m.levi@parool.nl.
2024-01-06 02:00:10
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