Worrying COVID ‘Cicada’ Variant Spreads as US Maps Go Dark - Newsweek

0ShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberSee more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.Federal funding cuts for one of America's major infectious disease surveillance programs could threaten public health responses, experts say, sparking widespread concern, particularly as a newer variant of COVID-19 continues to spread across the U.S., highlighting the need for monitoring systems. As part of President Donald Trump's budget plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) will see its funding cut from around $125 million a year to about $25 million. The American Society for Microbiology sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee in April, warning that the CDC has "exhausted all available supplemental funding to support wastewater at the agency and will have no funding to sustain the national program beyond Sept. 30, 2026." "Without additional funding, the U.S. could lose this vital and cost-effective early warning system at a time of increasing public health threats," the association added. This comes as the COVID-19 variant BA.3.2, also known as "cicada," is spreading across the U.S. and has already been detected in 25 states, according to the latest data by the CDC. "It is unfathomable for wastewater surveillance to be cut at a time when there are multiple major outbreaks circulating across the globe for highly pathogenic viruses that cause morbid disease and death," Rachel Noble, a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Newsweek. She added that the medical cost of treating individuals for any given pathogen outbreak "is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of wastewater surveillance. So wastewater surveillance is an investment in prevention and protection." The "cicada" variant results in similar symptoms to those associated with COVID-19, such as cough, fever, sore throat, congestion, shortness of breath, loss of smell or taste and others, though as it is a mutated variant, it could evade immunity from previous infections or vaccinations. Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told Newsweek that the "cicada" variant "has a number of new mutations that lead to partial escape from current neutralizing antibody responses, but so far it does not appear to lead to more severe symptoms." The variant was first detected in states through the NWSS in California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. WastewaterSCAN, a wastewater surveillance program that tracks infectious diseases across the country, run by Stanford University and Emory University, found the variant in California, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan and Ohio. There has also been recent discussion about how COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers should update their vaccines to keep up with rapidly mutating variants, with some believing vaccines targeting the XFG variant would be most effective, and others questioning whether the "cicada" variant may become more dominant. "This variant has some concerning mutations that allow it to evade a lot of the immunity to COVID-19 present in the human population," Andrew Pekosz, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, told Newsweek. However, he added that it has been spreading "very slowly" and "rarely becomes the dominant COVID variant in any region." He said his concern is whether the variant will mutate further and become a "faster spreading virus." The CDC's NWSS began under the 2020 CARES Act and was later expanded with supplemental funding through legislation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, it monitors more than 1,000 sites across the U.S. It is designed to detect and monitor infectious diseases through wastewater samples, tracking viruses including COVID-19, influenza, measles and many others. Studies have found that wastewater testing can provide insight into disease spread months before cases are confirmed before doctors, allowing public health response teams to prevent further spread much sooner. However, now that the system will receive only $25 million a year, it is likely that programs will have to be cut nationally, which public health practitioners and scientists have warned could stop experts from tracking hot spots or areas vulnerable to disease spread that they said was "alarming," not only given the "resurgence of measles" but also the spread of other infectious diseases. The People's CDC, a coalition of public health practitioners, scientists and healthcare workers, is trying to get constituents to contact their members of Congress to warn them of the impact of gutting the wastewater surveillance system. As of Tuesday morning, more than 2,880 letters had been sent by constituents, according to the Action Network website—not far from the coalition's goal of 3,000. The coalition is also demanding that Congress permanently extend and provide full funding for NWSS. With the cuts, Dave Larsen, chair of the Public Health Department at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that $25 million would only be enough to fund wastewater surveillance in a few states, and mean only seasonal epidemic pathogens like influenza, RSV and COVID-19 could be tracked. "But we would lose wastewater surveillance as a tool to respond to outbreaks such as hantavirus, Ebola, measles or polio," he said. "And we would lose the national coverage that the current wastewater surveillance system has." Amy Pruden-Bagchi, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University, told Newsweek that "such a dramatic cut would be unfortunate, as it undermines the investments that were made to build up wastewater disease surveillance systems in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic." "Cutting funding to this program would be a huge setback and in the long term will be more costly than maintaining the program at full capacity," she added. Noble said that she has "serious concerns about any cuts to wastewater surveillance," as it is "a medically diagnostic technology for assessing community disease and outbreaks of emerging disease." She explained that it enables public health experts to have the capability to detect "even just one or two infected individuals in any given municipality for many of our diseases of concern," and help public health response teams reduce the spread of potential outbreaks much faster. "Those few weeks that we might save in pathogen detection would be very valuable in saving thousands of lives in the context of a vaccine that could be produced," she added. Wastewater surveillance also allows detection to happen outside of doctor or emergency room visits "before symptoms are severe enough for people to seek medical attention," giving teams more time to react, Nicole Fahrenfeld, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rutgers University, told Newsweek. Larsen said he was also "concerned" about the funding cuts, as he said wastewater surveillance is "critical public health infrastructure that keeps us safe from infectious disease outbreaks and keeps us informed about pathogens circulating in our communities." Pekosz said that wastewater surveillance is "an incredibly powerful tool to track infectious diseases," allowing public health experts to "monitor mild cases of disease" and "prepare for surges of severe infections that usually come a few days to weeks after a virus is detected in wastewater." "It's also incredibly efficient, as you can sample wide regions—and therefore tens of thousands of people—with just a few samples," he said. "We need to be investing in more wastewater surveillance and building a response network around what wastewater surveillance tells us."