Poo Dunnit

00:00:37
Dr. Jess Steier: You think it’s another outbreak?

00:00:39
Seargeant: Too early to say, but we need to move fast.

00:00:43
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Something feels familiar, Sarge. A little too familiar.

00:00:48
Dr. Jess Steier: Well, Detective, I’ve been doing some digging on the side, undercover stuff. Gotten close with a few guys who know the city’s underbelly, and lately, they say something’s different on their turf. Might be worth heading down to the old sewers.

00:01:03
Sergeant: Smart thinking, Steier. Sometimes to find the number one clue, you got to follow number two.

00:01:09
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Number two? Like poo? Seriously?

00:01:13
Dr. Jess Steier: Well, you said something stinks, didn’t you, Byers.

00:01:23
Dr. Kaylee Byers: You are listening to Nice Genes, the podcast that sleuths through the scientific sewers in search of clues, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your lead detective, Dr. Kaylee Byers.

00:01:34
Dr. Jess Steier: And I’m Dr. Jess Steier, your trusty co-detective on the case.

00:01:38
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. Trench coats on, a coffee is strong, and the case file is open. Case number one, how wastewater surveillance is tracking disease outbreaks. Lucky for me, I’ve got my favorite partner in grime on the case, Dr. Jess Steier. Well, welcome back to the pod.

00:01:56
Dr. Jess Steier: Hey, Kaylee, I’m happy to be back on the case with you.

00:01:59
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So listeners might recognize you from a little co-hosty collab we did last season outside the regular Nice Jeans lineup, and we just had so much fun, so we thought why not rope you in again? And today’s mission, we’re going to dig into the not-so-glamorous business of wastewater. But before we start getting into the evidence, can you tell folks a bit about what you do?

00:02:20
Dr. Jess Steier: So I am a public health scientist and my jam, my training is in evaluation science, so evaluating health policies and programs using data, and I have put on my science communicator hat and now I run Unbiased Science. We have our own podcast and we do infographics on social media and newsletters and all the things.

00:02:46
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So are you ready to luge down some sewer pipes?

00:02:50
Dr. Jess Steier: Let’s do it.

00:02:52
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Step one in this investigation, we are bringing in an expert who’s not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

00:02:59
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: My name is Natalie Prystajecky and I study poop.

00:03:02
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Truly, no better intro.

00:03:05
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Beyond that, my job is that I am a program head at the BCCDC Public Health Lab, so this is the lab for the province of BC, and at this job, I oversee our environmental microbiology lab as well as our molecular and genomics program. And then I’m also a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

00:03:25
Dr. Jess Steier: So can you give us a little wastewater 101? Can you explain what it actually is?

00:03:31
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Well, the first thing is let’s take a look at what wastewater means. And so often when people think wastewater, they think just poop, poop and pee. So I ask you this question, when you think about wastewater, what does a wastewater sample look like to you?

00:03:45
Dr. Jess Steier: I’m picturing brown and smelly sludge.

00:03:49
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Yeah, and I think that’s what most people do, and I often will take them into our lab fridge and be like, “This is wastewater.” And in fact, it just looks like iced tea. And I know that’s not the greatest image. I’m sorry. You’ll never think about iced tea the same way, but you have to remember that wastewater is actually wasted water and it’s everything that comes out of your house.

So you run your shower, you flush the toilet, you run your dishwasher, all that water is going into the wastewater as well. So first it flows from your house through pipes, then it eventually makes it to the wastewater plant. They’ll go through a grate to remove the toilet paper, all the things you’re not supposed to flush like dental floss and maybe condoms, and then we get the sample, so that is what wastewater is. So anytime you flush the toilet or you wash your body, all of that water ends up in a wastewater treatment plant, and the whole goal of wastewater treatment is to remove nutrients and bacteria and chemicals to make it safer for disposal. But all of that material, you’re basically taking the waste of an entire community and it’s entering a plant, so then that allows you to understand what is happening at the scale of a city or a town, and it’s really a treasure trove when it comes to what people are flushing down the toilet.

00:05:03
Dr. Jess Steier: I love that you think it’s a treasure trove. I totally, totally agree. So what diseases and viruses can we track in wastewater?

00:05:12
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: The question really isn’t what can we track but what can’t we track? Glass half full there. There’s a water joke for you.

00:05:19
Dr. Jess Steier: Iced tea.

00:05:19
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Ice tea, glass half full, iced tea. When I first started doing wastewater testing, it makes a lot of sense to test things that are in feces, and so you can test for salmonella and E. coli and norovirus, but that’s not the only thing that is shed through your gut. We can detect almost any respiratory virus simply because if it’s replicating up in that upper respiratory tract, it will eventually make it into your poo, and likewise viruses that are on your skin, so Mpox for example. You’re showering. If you have an active lesion, when you’re showering, you’re shedding the virus into your shower water. If you have lesions on your body and you wash your sheets, the virus can end up in the wastewater, things that are shed in your urine like measles. So you can imagine that anything that’s shed from your body can be detected in wastewater.

00:06:06
Dr. Jess Steier: So how do we actually go about tracking these viruses? How do you test?

00:06:12
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Right. So our job when it comes to wastewater surveillance is to quantify how much of a virus or a bacteria is in wastewater. So we want to know, is the concentration going up or going down? Simply, is it there or not? So presence, absence as well. The amount of DNA or RNA in a wastewater sample is just way too small to be able to detect it directly, so that’s why we use something called polymerase chain reaction or PCR, which is an amplification technique where we can take just a couple of copies of a gene of interest and multiply it exponentially so it’s actually detectable. So that’s what PCR is. It’s really around detection and quantification.

Now, if we want to know what strain of SARS-CoV-2 is circulating or if the dominant influenza strain in wastewater influenza, is it H-1 or is it H-3? You can’t do that with a PCR very easily, so what you have to do is actually figure out the actual genetic code of what you’re finding in wastewater. So we usually do both. We will do the detection and quantification by PCR, as well as characterization, the detailed genetic analysis by sequencing.

00:07:19
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. PCR tells us if something’s there and then sequencing tells us exactly what it is. Is it just viruses we can track or are there other things we can learn from wastewater beyond just what makes us sick?

00:07:33
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Yeah, so there’s a lot of evidence that testing for substances is a great way to do surveillance at a larger scale, so substances like cocaine or fentanyl. And so it has been used very widely in Canada, the US and Europe to do surveillance on trends of substance use, and there’s probably about a decade of data that’s available and it’s really, really powerful data. When we think about some of the surveillance that’s done for substance use, it’s really often the tip of the iceberg, so the most severe cases or the seized substances, but we don’t necessarily get a sense of what’s happening at the community level, so this is a fantastic way. We also see people using it to test for metabolites of caffeine or of birth control. People excrete a lot of different substances that aren’t necessarily illegal substances in their urine and feces as well, and there’s even been a speculation that you could test for serotonin levels, which means that you could test happiness in wastewater.

00:08:35
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So yes, we are tracking viruses, but we’re also able to pick up traces of all kinds of things, nicotine, anti-anxiety meds, energy drink chemicals, gene juice, or stress hormones, probably also particularly high during those early COVID days. Wastewater spills the beans on all kinds of habits and health clues. It’s like dusting a sewer grate for fingerprints, but here’s where it gets sticky, icky, icky. The clearer the data gets, the murkier the ethical questions become. We also have people’s DNA entering the system, so can you talk a little bit about some of the potential privacy concerns we should be thinking about when we do this kind of work?

00:09:16
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: The first thing is that there has been ethics reviews about whether or not you need to inform someone or a community that their wastewater is being tested, and what came back from the research ethics board was that once you flush the toilet, there is no expectation for privacy, so when you flush your toilet, you do not expect that there is any protection of the materials you’ve excreted. It’s a little bit different than when you go to a hospital and get a stool sample tested for Campylobacter. You have an expectation it’s only going to be tested for Campylobacter, but when you flush the toilet, there’s no expectation.

That said, we have to be very mindful of the impact it could have, and we’ve generally focused on only larger communities. I think the smallest community we test is 50,000 people. When you do it at that scale, there’s really no harm of self-identification in a dataset or that there’s an expectation of privacy in that large of a sample. But you can imagine going into a small community, a rural community. You could be sampling from a school or a long-term care facility, and there’s a different expectation. So I think that certainly when you’re doing it at those smaller scales, there’s an expectation of disclosure, and there’s also the expectation that you are having your work reviewed by a research ethics board, just to make sure that you don’t have any biases or blind spots. But of course, there are times where I do worry about some of the work that some people have done. There was someone in the US, there was a very interesting COVID lineage that he found in wastewater and he was able to locate it back to not just a town but to the level of the sub sewer shed, so it was some of these buildings, and put up signs being like, “If you have chronic symptoms, will you contact me?” He wanted to be that detective to find out who had the chronic COVID. We consider ourselves those poop detectives, but we’re like poop detectives at a community level, not at an individual level.

00:11:07
Dr. Jess Steier: That’s the tricky part of being a poop detective. The data’s rich, but the responsibility is even richer. Still, when done right, the payoff is huge.

00:11:18
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What’s the benefit to public health to having that kind of data at scale?

00:11:22
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: So you can imagine that there’s just huge gaps in what we know, simply because people aren’t getting tested, and the people who are going to end up having flu and going to the hospital have to be the ones that are the most clinically severe. You don’t become clinically severe as soon as you start shedding the virus. It’s usually because you’ve developed quite a severe infection. You might be symptomatic a couple of days after exposure, but your peak symptom presentation could be as late as a week or 10 days after your initial exposure, whereas you’re going to start shedding that virus within a couple of days. So that’s the benefit of wastewater, is that everybody pees, everybody poos. It’s all going into that wonderful wastewater treatment plant, our treasure trove, and it allows us to do unbiased surveillance versus quite biased surveillance, which is associated with test-seeking behavior.

00:12:06
Dr. Jess Steier: This kind of unbiased surveillance, it was a game changer during COVID. Instead of just counting positive tests from people who made it to a clinic, scientists could get a much fuller picture by tracking case numbers, even looking at upticks in over-the-counter meds like ibuprofen, all without anyone needing to swab a nose. So then, okay, you’re finding some of these positive results, you’re seeing something crop up, you’re seeing some activity on a particular pathogen, whatever it is. What then happens? Does that then inform public health practice?

00:12:39
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Yeah, so that data is available to the medical health officers, the chief medical health officer, epidemiologists. We put our data online pretty much immediately so even the public can see it in near real time and decisions can be made. So in BC, it’s a big thing to declare the opening and the closing of the respiratory season because there’s extra countermeasures in place to reduce the burden, particularly on the hospitalized patients, so there’ll be masking requirements as an example. The declaration that the respiratory season has started is a combination of clinical data and wastewater data.

00:13:12
Dr. Kaylee Byers: This all sounds super cutting-edge, right? Using this technology to track outbreaks in real time. But the tech, it isn’t all that new. If it were a person, it’d be a millennial, an elder millennial. If only I could remember my MySpace password.

00:13:28
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: PCR has been hot since the eighties, really accessible since the nineties and came off patent in the 2000s, so it’s been around for a long time in the diagnostic world, but I would say that COVID pushed environmental micro into the molecular world, which I think was really important. And so I think a decade of science happened in one year in terms of how quickly a new research method would’ve developed in any other scenario, so really, the pandemic, as terrible as it was, it was an accelerator for science.

00:13:59
Dr. Kaylee Byers: The pandemic might’ve been wastewater surveillance’s big breakout rule, but its origin story, well, that takes us back nearly a hundred years and to a very different disease.

00:14:11
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: Everyone thinks that wastewater testing started with COVID, and that is not true. The first couple of wastewater papers in the ’40s was for polio.

00:14:19
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: We have seen many epidemics come and go, but this year’s polio epidemic has been the greatest in America’s history.

00:14:27
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: And in fact, wastewater testing is one of the ways to demonstrate that a country is polio free, so wastewater and polio have a huge history that people often forget.

00:14:38
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: There is really that idea, certainly amongst the general public, that polio is no longer an issue, but it very much is.

00:14:44
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Coming up, a new field detective brings us to a place called Makoko, Nigeria, where we catch polio in the act. You are listening to Nice Genes, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers.

00:15:06
Dr. Jess Steier: And I’m your co-host, Dr. Jess Steier from Unbiased Science. If you like Nice Genes, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows and leave a review. If you’re into following the science wherever it flows, pass this episode down the pipeline to a fellow sewage scout. All right, detectives, let’s keep this investigation going.

00:15:30
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: So I am a physician by background, so I studied medicine and I also studied human genetics at King’s College London, and now I’m a journalist.

00:15:39
Dr. Jess Steier: That’s Dr. Yemisi Bokinni. She swapped stethoscopes for story leads and now tracks global health headlines for outlets like Nature Africa and the British Medical Journal.

00:15:51
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Before we dive into how you do that reporting, I’m wondering, one of the focuses of your reporting has been on polio, and that’s something we hear about in the news every once in a while. It’s certainly been more and more frequent recently. Can you give us a little bit of background about what polio is and how it spreads?

00:16:10
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: Polio is an infectious disease. It’s been around for a very long time. Essentially, it causes paralysis in 1% of cases, but if you can imagine before we actually had vaccines, 1% of cases of paralysis was a huge number globally. And we’ve done a great job. Over 99% of polio and paralysis cases have been cut down due to public health efforts and due to the vaccines that have been made available.

00:16:37
Dr. Kaylee Byers: There are three types of wild polio that are kind of like genetic siblings. When we talk about wild polio, we are talking about the version of the virus that spreads naturally. Type 2 polio was declared eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019, but wild polio virus type 1 is still circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Vaccines have helped us wipe out most paralytic polio cases, but they’ve also opened the door to a new challenge. In very rare cases, new polio strains also emerge from vaccines themselves.

00:17:14
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: At the moment, we have two main types of vaccinations against polio, and the oral polio vaccine essentially uses a weakened form of the virus and that’s historically how vaccines have been created. You get a virus, make sure it’s super, super weak, and the idea is that once that’s taken or injected or taken orally, then the immune system would mount a response to it. But in some instances, it’s possible that that very, very weakened form of that virus can turn back into a more infectious strain, and that tends to happen in about one in 10 million cases of oral polio vaccine use, so that’s essentially how we ended up getting some of the strains that we’re dealing with at the moment.

00:17:55
Dr. Jess Steier: And so do these emerging strains make polio harder to detect in people?

00:18:00
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: The challenge we have about polio is that only 1% of cases actually present with the paralytic symptoms, so it’s very possible for there to be underlying community transmission before you actually see a case of polio. And as we know, the more a virus propagates in a community, the higher the likelihood that it can develop mutations. And so therefore, it’s in our best interest to not have this virus propagating from person to person because the more it transmits, it’s possible that these mutations may essentially develop to a point where it’s even more virulent or a more serious strain. And so therefore, the goal is preventing transmission, whether we are seeing cases or not

00:18:44
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Enter wastewater surveillance, and one place using it to get ahead of polio is Makoko. Sometimes called the Venice of Nigeria, Makoko is a sprawling self-built community of floating homes along the Lagos Lagoon. Originally founded as a fishing village in the 18th century, it’s now home to hundreds of thousands despite not being formally recognized as a city, and therefore, often overlooked when it comes to public services.

00:19:13
Dr. Kaylee Byers: One of the stories that you’ve written about is polio surveillance in Makoko. What drew you to the story of polio surveillance here?

00:19:21
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: So I’m a press fellow with the UN Foundation, and so we had this opportunity to travel and do stories. A lot of the work I do is on global health themes. I learned about the significance of this area called Makoko, which is essentially a floating village. It’s an informal settlement, and a PhD student just randomly had detected wild polio virus there and there had been no cases of paralysis or visible polio in the community at that time. So that was a strong indicator that monitoring the wastewater, certainly in that community, would be a very, very important tool.

00:20:00
Dr. Jess Steier: So I do science communication but I do it from my living room, so I would love to know more about what it’s like reporting on the ground and how the community responds to your presence and to the wastewater surveillance in general.

00:20:17
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: Makoko is a very interesting space in terms of social dynamics. It primarily consists of ancestors of people who migrated to that region in Nigeria from neighboring countries, so Benin Republic, et cetera. So they’re a very insular community, very suspicious of strangers, so it’s very important to make sure that you build a rapport with people in that community so you are able to monitor the health situation in places like that. And although they’ve built an element of rapport with the team, you still do have to blend in and not make too much of a scene and also engage with the community every time you’re about to try and do anything within the community. Greet everyone, especially in Nigerian culture, someone just walking through without greeting people to the left and the right and the front, that’s not a Nigerian custom, so you really do have to make sure that the community are comfortable with your presence before you’re actually able to do what we went there for, which was to get some samples for analysis.

00:21:20
Dr. Jess Steier: Can you walk us through the actual wastewater surveillance process in this setting? How are you collecting samples? How does that process work?

00:21:29
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: So in Nigeria, especially in Lagos, especially for sampling at that site, they have very, very strict timeframes, so between 6:00 and 6:30 AM. So very early in the morning, samples must be taken, and they have a sample collector who heads out before dawn and you begin the journey. From the outskirts, it’s very convoluted, it’s on water. You essentially navigate by a boat or if you’re going to go through foot, you have to take a very long journey to try and get to the sample collection site. Then you have the sample collector who takes the sample, labels it, and within essentially two hours, it takes a train journey to the newly accredited lab in a neighboring town known as Ibadan.

00:22:10
Dr. Jess Steier: Earlier this year, Nigeria opened up a new WHO-accredited genome sequencing lab, bringing cutting edge virus tracking straight to places like Makoko. So what is the impact of having that lab, that sequencing capacity so nearby?

00:22:31
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: Yeah, so my understanding is actually only the third WHO-accredited lab in Africa for sequencing on polio, and up until then, they were able to do PCR-based amplification, detects crude elements of the polio virus there, but they essentially had to send samples to the US CDC in Atlanta for actual sequencing, so you can imagine how much that adds to the delay in getting timely results. Nigeria is a country of 200 million people, and now you have a facility in country that’s able to sequence that and process that without having to ship samples overseas for verification, so it’s made a huge difference. And shortly after it was accredited, there was a case of paralytic polio which was linked between the north and the south of the country, so if you had someone who was in the north of the country traveling to the south, it’s very possible there was a lot of transmission in between. And what they were able to do was because they were able to sequence very quickly, they were able to identify essentially where in the country it had come from and carry out activities in that region in terms of boosts of vaccination campaigns very, very quickly. The advantage of sequencing is the fact that you’re really able to pinpoint very specific characteristics per strain, and those specific characteristics are usually tied to particular geographies or particular countries. So that lag would prevent cross-border communication about particular strains that have been detected, so it has made a huge difference. It really has.

00:24:06
Dr. Kaylee Byers: In 2024, 36% of all the vaccine derived polio cases worldwide happened in Nigeria, so having a WHO accredited lab to monitor wastewater on home soil isn’t just practical. It’s a big milestone. It means faster answers, local control, and a stronger foundation for the future. And while Nigeria is building its own defenses, the fight against polio is far from over because pathogens, well, they don’t care about borders.

00:24:34
Dr. Yemisi Bokinni: We’re seeing polio detected in wastewater pretty much everywhere, so everywhere as far as Germany to Poland to Guinea, and as vaccine skepticism increases globally, you’re having fewer and fewer people potentially immunized against polio. There is that risk that they may end up getting one of these strains.

Case in point, the case in New York in 2022, a 22-year-old man who hadn’t been vaccinated against polio, and this is why I emphasize the importance of communication and collaboration across borders, because that strain was genetically linked to strains from Israel and in London. So because of that communication between researchers in the US, in the UK and in Israel, they were able to respond very quickly to that, focusing on North London with booster campaigns, et cetera. So it’s crucial, and I think it’s unfortunate if that sort of cross border collaboration and sharing of knowledge decreases in any way, shape or form, because it’s been vital. Vital for COVID, it’s vital for polio, it’s vital for so many other different things when it comes to global public health.

There are so many different applications, everything from drug use through to future pandemics through to antimicrobial resistance, through to the ongoing issue of polio. There’s a whole range of different things that you could essentially use this for because it’s a preemptive tool, and I think oftentimes, medicine has been very much reactive, waiting for catastrophe and then responding to that. Whereas with something like wastewater surveillance, you can really detect things very early and act quickly, therefore preventing wider issues. So I think it’s a powerful preemptive tool, and I think it should be adopted more broadly.

00:26:25
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What Dr. Bokinni is mentioning here is so important. Our medical systems tend to focus on reaction and not prevention, and if we learned anything from COVID, it was that we need better plans in place for when the next pandemic inevitably comes along. Let’s go back to our resident poop CSI, Dr. Natalie Prystajecky.

00:26:44
Dr. Jess Steier: What are the implications of this for future pandemics? And I don’t want to knock on wood, but knock on wood that we won’t have one soon, but what are the implications of wastewater surveillance?

00:26:55
Natalie Prystajecky: Well, I wish I could take you into my lab right now. The freezer is a problem because it’s hard to throw things out, because what if we need those in the future? What if there were samples that actually are showing the beginning of something? So we as microbiologists tend to hoard things a little bit, so we have samples back to 2020. If something was emerging, ideally, we are in a situation where we’re continuing to sample and that we do have that archive that we could go back to and test if something new is emerging, so it allows us to be prepared. Now, here’s the counter aspect of it all, is that the pandemic is over. We spent a lot of money during the pandemic, and across Canada and in the US and around the world, a lot of the investments during the pandemic are not being sustained. And so we have seen in some parts of Canada the wastewater programs being entirely shut down or the scale back. So that is the reality, is that governments are looking to cut costs, that those programs can’t be sustained in the way they continue to be. And many say that COVID was not disease X, COVID was like disease mini mini X, like disease X is going to be big. Everyone’s talking about how would we respond to disease X? And so our goal is that we maintain at least some surveillance so that if we ever had to scale back up, we would be ready.

00:28:17
Dr. Jess Steier: So Natalie, you’ve gotten me really excited about wastewater surveillance. I’m curious, what excites you most about this field and where you see it heading?

00:28:30
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: I think the possibilities are endless, and if we do maintain a base network of surveillance, that we have that opportunity to really respond to anything that is emerging ahead of us. Some of the areas that I’m most interested in is seeing it applied within the One Health context. So we do know that as we have a warming climate, the geographic range of some of these pathogens may expand north. We can really do this work as an early detection system. Back to that initial comment, what can’t you test in wastewater? I think that there are just so many possibilities and I think that we really have an opportunity to change the way the public health is done. That is really the huge opportunity that we have here. I feel like we barely scratched the surface of what we can do with wastewater, and it’s really exciting to be just at that cusp. I know it’s such an unglamorous topic, but such an exciting topic. I also just love that the public loves it. A lot of our work in public health before the pandemic was invisible, and this seemed to be a way that people really did connect with public health, and to connect and get data at their fingertips on a disease prevalence that they were never able to access before. So I love how it really has brought this type of science to the forefront.

00:29:38
Dr. Jess Steier: I think what you’re doing is really incredible. Thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for coming on the pod.

00:29:44
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

00:29:47
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, Jess, I don’t know about you, but diving into all that toilet talk, totally cathartic.

00:29:54
Dr. Jess Steier: Could not agree more.

00:29:56
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So what do you think? Shall we slip back into our seventies DNA detective personas.

00:30:02
Dr. Jess Steier: Please?

00:30:05
Seargeant: Well, nice work detectives. Thanks to your quick action, the lab’s already mobilized. Whatever was starting to bubble up down there, we got ahead of it.

00:30:14
Dr. Jess Steier: Glad I could lend a hand, Sarge. Your gut instinct was right, byers. You’ve got a strong sense of deja vu.

00:30:21
Dr. Kaylee Byers: More like deja poo?

00:30:25
Seargeant: One more upburst like that, Byers, and I’ll have your badge. Steier, your undercover intel helped crack this one wide open. I appreciate you stepping in for the case.

00:30:34
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Couldn’t have done it without you, Steier.

00:30:35
Dr. Jess Steier: Likewise, detective. I’ll see you around.

00:30:38
Seargeant: Byers, don’t hang up that trench coat just yet. Another case just landed on my desk.

00:30:43
Dr. Kaylee Byers: A detective’s work is never done. Our guests for today were Dr. Natalie Prystajecky, who leads the Environmental Microbiology Program at the BC Center for Disease Control, and medical doctor, health journalist, and UN press fellow, Dr. Yemisi Bokinni.

00:31:04
Dr. Jess Steier: You’ve been listening to Nice Genes, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from, share it with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on social media by going to @GenomeBC.

00:31:24
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Next time, we bring our investigation to the NICU, where the tiniest patients are getting big help from genomics.

00:31:32
Meredith Thomas: My mom came home and both of us were just staring at her being like, what is happening? This baby is so sick, and we can’t get any help.

00:31:43
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thanks for being on the case with us. Until next time, detectives.