Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

9 INFECTION CONTROL How St. Jude is encouraging young people to get HPV vaccines By Katie Adams M emphis, Tenn.-based St. Jude Children's Re- search Hospital launched its "Path to a Bright Future" campaign on March 4, International HPV Awareness Day. The awareness campaign explains the benefits of HPV vaccination and the dangers of HPV pre-cancers and cancers. Dozens of organizations have become partners to am- plify the campaign's messaging, including the cancer centers at University of California San Diego, University of New Mexico Health System in Albuquerque and Ohio State University in Columbus. Fact sheets, info- graphics, posters and social assets are available to the campaign's partners nationwide. The campaign kicked off in the southeastern U.S., where HPV vaccination rates remain well below national averages. n The issues with wastewater surveillance By Erica Carbajal S ince people shed the coronavirus in their feces before showing symp- toms or testing positive, wastewater surveillance of virus levels is intended to serve as an early warning system for up- coming surges or new variant detection. But these efforts are patchy in the U.S. The CDC's SARS-CoV-2 surveillance map shows many of the 732 sampling sites that report data to the agency are concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast. Overall, just a dozen states — California, Colo- rado, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin — rou- tinely submit data to the CDC's National Wastewater Surveillance System, which the agency launched in September 2020, Politico reported. Even in states regularly submitting waste- water samples, information isn't uniform. For example, of the 23 collection sites in California, most of them are clustered in the Bay Area. Further, not all communities have the resources to leverage this tool. Wastewater testing initially took off in ur- ban areas and university towns where there was access to research expertise and equip- ment, e Los Angeles Times reported. "You should be injecting more resourc- es in places that are underserved since they have the disproportionate burden of disease," Colleen Naughton, PhD, an engineering professor at the University of California Merced who is helping set up wastewater testing in several smaller towns in the state, told the LA Times. Experts have also expressed concern that information on the CDC's wastewater surveillance dashboard can be misinter- preted. For instance, the dashboard pres- ents percent changes in virus detection. For the 15-day period ending March 17, coronavirus levels rose at 40 percent of sampling sites, but some of the changes may not reflect big shifts in risk level. "The CDC is presenting relative viral concentration (percent change). But, that may be deceptive. You can have a 1000 percent increase that takes you from 'very low risk' to 'low risk,' the Pandemic Pre- vention Institute said in a series of March 16 tweets. Looking at CDC's map alone, it's hard to spot trends, as there are some counties where some sampling sites show an increase in virus levels, and others show a decrease. "Wastwater is a powerful tool to detect COVID-19 surges, but only if data are an- alyzed and presented so that policymakers and communities know how to respond," the Pandemic Prevention Institute tweeted. "Are we in the earliest days of another surge? We might be. But using the CDC wastewater metrics, we just don't know." n CDC creates center for disease forecasting By Erica Carbajal T he CDC on April 19 launched a Center for Fore- casting and Outbreak Analytics aimed at improving response measures during disease outbreaks. "CFA seeks to enhance the nation's ability to use data, models and analytics to enable timely, effective decision making in response to public health threats for CDC and its public health partners," the agency said in a news release. The center's priorities are to leverage infectious disease modeling and analytics to improve outbreak response and better support federal and local leaders. The CDC said the center will also create a program to communicate about disease events with the public to guide personal decision making, similar to the National Weather Service. Planning for the center started in August, with initial fund- ing of $200 million from the American Rescue Plan Act. "The capabilities and team we are building at the new center will improve decision making in a health crisis," said Dylan George, PhD, director of operations for the Center for Fore- casting and Outbreak Analytics. "I am proud of the CFA team and excited for the future. Better data and analytics will give us better responses to protect all Americans." n

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