Sewers Can Offer Almost Real-Time Disease Outbreak Data | Massive Science

Five years ago, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Marine Biological Laboratory reported that they could predict obesity levels of a city from the sewage microbiome with 81 to 89 percent accuracy. They also found that the microbiomes of the humans living in a city are represented in that city’s sewage.

The microbiome, the collection of microbes that live in the human gut, is thought to be linked to health. But the connections between gut microbiome and health are often made using individual samples. In the sewers, it’s a different story and what's found there can tell the lives of an entire population from just one sample.