A two-year wastewater surveillance study from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell found that the drug use in a rural New England college town rose dramatically during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Society for Risk Analysis.
Sheree Pagsuyoin, an expert on wastewater monitoring for drugs and COVID-19, showed that the consumption of dangerous drugs like fentanyl and amphetamines in the rural town rose in the early months of the pandemic. The greatest increase, of 286 percent, was seen in the use of the stimulant methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA).
To look for trends in drug use within the community, Pagsuyoin and her team collected sewage samples from a local wastewater facility twice monthly over a two-year period, from September 2018 to August 2020. The samples were analyzed for concentrations of 10 priority opioids and stimulants — including morphine, codeine, hydrocodone, methadone, fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, MDMA, and methyldiethanolamine (MDEA).
Study results showed the following:
- The highest per capita consumption was of cocaine, morphine, and amphetamine,
- Drug consumption was greater during spring semesters, and
- The highest per capita consumption of fentanyl was greater than that of other rural and university settings in the U.S..
Wastewater surveillance is a growing practice globally. The COVID-19 pandemic helped legitimize the practice as a less invasive, cost-efficient way to monitor public health. It allows scientists to detect concentrations of drugs or biomarkers in sewage, providing an estimate of community drug use or disease infection rates.
Using wastewater data to track pathogens has been the most common use of the surveillance since the pandemic, but its use to monitor other public health is still being explored.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), New England is considered to be a hotspot of the opioid crisis in the U.S. There are high rates of drug consumption and drug-related deaths from prescription drugs such as fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, codeine and morphine. Thanks to the data that wastewater has provided, this newest research shows that some communities may also be experiencing a crisis with stimulants.
“Our findings reflect the regionwide problem with opioid-related overdoses and increasing stimulant prescription rates,” says Pagsuyoin.
Pagsuyoin discussed her work in a talk titled “Wastewater-based Epidemiology: An Emerging Tool for Public Health Surveillance and Early Warning for Disease Outbreaks” on Dec. 6, 2022, as part of the Society for Risk Analysis’s symposium on the Costs and Benefits of Managing Security and Safety Risks.
