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'Smart Sewer' Project Will Reveal a City's Microbiome
the_newsbeagle writes: Public health officials want to turn streams of sewage into streams of data. A new project in Cambridge, Mass. will equip sewer tunnels with robotic samplers that can routinely collect sewage from 10 different locations. MIT scientists will then analyze the sewage content for early signs of a viral outbreak or a food-borne bacterial illness, and may be able to draw conclusions about specific health trends throughout the city. This Cambridge effort is a proof of concept; the MIT researchers plan to deploy a larger system in Kuwait, where officials are particularly interested in studying obesity and the effectiveness of public health interventions.
How long before it's mandated that each toilet have one of these to cut costs in the socialist healthcare system?
Oh, rather a long time since this isn't remotely what the study is trying to do. We don't really know what a 'good' stool sample is yet, but studies like this have tantalizing clues. According TFA one can tell whether a population is 'lean' or 'obese' with an approximate selectivity of 80%. Scanning TFA didn't reveal exactly where this came from but this sort of analysis may well lead to you shitting in a cup rather than peeing in it the next time you go the the clinic.
Some long term studies like this over many years and in many places could be very interesting indeed.
OTOH, they mention that 90+% of the fecal matter in the studies sewer systems are from non human sources. This leads inquiring minds to wonder if there are that many rats in a typical city.
Or if something else lives down there.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Lest we forget our current state of affairs wrt privacy, note:
If the police can access the data, they can use it to determine lots of things about you. For example, they can probably detect if there's a meth lab upstream from the current location, and use this as a guide for the placement of more sensors. Eventually they'll narrow it down to a single household, and know where the meth lab is.
They could do this with drug use as well. They could find evidence of, say, cocaine use in the stream and use this to place more sensors, then narrow it down to an individual household. Then see if the household member is in a critical job, such as ambulance driver or surgeon.
They could determine the ethnic profile of individual homes from the food eaten.
They could determine the health of individuals living in individual homes in several ways - detecting diabetes, or obesity, or diet for example. Insurance companies would probably want this information.
And legally, their response would probably be "you have no right to privacy for anything that you flush into the public sewers", or "just as with driving or flying, you can choose not to do it" or some such.
I can see a lot of benefit from doing this (sewer monitoring in India is being used to show that polio has been eradicated), but we really need to get a handle on the privacy implications from the start, before the big abuses begin.
This will be like video cameras: expensive at first, then ubiquitous. Look to see a sensor at the outlet from each home in a couple of decades.