Surveillance of Healthcare and Ambient Pathogens in our Environments and Spaces [SHAPES]

As an alternative to the time-consuming and resource-intensive process of testing individual humans, our team's previous work looked at how we can use environmental sampling to predict and potentially prevent COVID-19 outbreaks. The novel approach we developed uses swab samples taken from floors, which then undergo a lab processing technique that can detect the presence of the virus. The SHAPES project looks at expanding this approach beyond COVID-19 to other common infectious diseases in vulnerable populations. Our proposed work aims to assess the already-collected swab samples for two additional respiratory viruses (influenza and RSV) and two bacteria (VRE and C. difficile), which will allow us to quantify the prevalence of these organisms. In the second part of the work, we will collect additional swab samples to determine how detection of these pathogens correlates to infections in humans at the sampling location. Our goal is to see what these floor samples can tell us about [1] whether a pathogen is present in an environment and [2] how that presence is associated with infections or outbreaks in the people in that environment. The approach of using environmental surveillance to predict and prevent outbreaks of infectious pathogens represents a new way of thinking about infection prevention. We hope to lay the groundwork for routine environmental surveillance of these common and potentially dangerous viruses and bacteria, especially in settings where there are vulnerable people, like long-term care homes and hospitals.