The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding its infectious disease surveillance program at four major US airports to more than 30 pathogens, including flu, RSV and other respiratory viruses.
The Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program, led by CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch, was introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic to detect new SARS-CoV-2 variants and other pathogens through nasal swab and wastewater sample collection from arriving international travelers at US airports.
“We have recognized that travelers are a highly significant population when it comes to monitoring new and emerging infections,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, who oversees the CDC’s traveler genomic surveillance program and holds the position of chief in the agency’s Travelers’ Health Branch, in a statement to CNN.
The program currently operates Covid-19 surveillance at seven major international airports in the United States. For a pilot program, it’s now expanding to test for more than 30 bacteria, antimicrobial resistance targets and viruses including influenza A and B, and respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, at Boston Logan International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The traveler surveillance program was introduced in 2021 when the CDC began collecting nasal swab samples from anonymous international travelers arriving at participating airports who volunteer to get swabbed. The US Centers
“We started this as a concept. Could we get travelers to volunteer at the airport to give us a sample voluntarily when they came in from countries all over the globe?” Friedman said. “And could we get enough samples to then test and do genomic sequencing and know very quickly what was coming into our country.”
As of last month, the surveillance program has tested over 370,000 travelers through nasal swab sampling, with around 6,000 travelers volunteering weekly. The program has collected samples from travelers from more than 135 countries and has sequenced more than 14,000 samples for further analysis.