Out of sight and out of mind, sewage can actually tell us a lot about health

Monday, September 14, 2015 - 23:00 in Psychology & Sociology

The maxim “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” certainly describes the work of Mariana G. Matus: The fourth-year PhD student in computational and systems biology at MIT is part of a team collecting samples of sewage to understand community health and behavior.  Although sewage is something most people prefer to leave out of sight and out of mind, Matus says that it is a gold mine of information. A small sample of sewage is likely to contain a variety of biomarkers that can yield data on infectious and chronic diseases such as influenza and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). “It’s not something that people really like to talk about,” Matus says. “But human waste can actually tell us a lot about health.” A worldly scholar Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t exactly her dream from day one to study sewage and stool samples; Matus’ research arose from interests in water scarcity and treatment. She grew up in...

Read the whole article on MIT Research

More from MIT Research

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net