Wastewater monitoring in Texas picked up an early signal of the bird flu outbreak

In early March, Dr. Blake Hanson and his colleagues at the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute were preparing for a fire drill of sorts. What if a virus with the potential to spark the next pandemic turned up in the wastewater they monitor? And what if that virus was the bird flu, H5N1, which has killed millions of animals and about half the nearly 900 people it has infected worldwide over the past two decades? They gamed out this what-if exercise on a Monday. By Thursday of that same week,...