Catching up with Marisa takes us back to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) and University of Michigan Grant that resulted in the Wigginton-Eisenberg Laboratory in 2022. The W-E lab 'works to provide wastewater testing data on multiple pathogens across south-east Michigan'. The dashboard they developed currently measures Influenza A; SARS-CoV-2 N1; Norovirus; Rotavirus and RSV and can be explored at the link above. This new dashboard emerged out of the initial University of Michigan Wastewater Dashboard that Dr. Eisenberg and her team developed to track Covid infection via wastewater, early in the pandemic. This transition was covered by Bridge Michigan: Sewer poop: it’s not just for COVID testing anymore.
Marisa and Krista Wigginton both contributed to the publication 'Wastewater-based Disease Surveillance for Public Health Action'
In January of 2024, it was announced that Marisa along with co-director Emily Toth Martin (SPH) were awarded the grant that would provide Michigan $17.5 million to establish the Michigan Public Health Integrated Center for Outbreak Analytics and Modeling, or MICOM. 'U-M receives CDC grant to establish center to help fight disease outbreaks, protect public health'.
“This center is a remarkable opportunity to build on the strong partnerships between the University of Michigan and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to integrate outbreak analytics, modeling and forecasting into public health practice and improve public health in Michigan and beyond,”
--Marisa Eisenberg, director of MICOM and associate professor of epidemiology and complex systems.
From this article: 'The University of Michigan is among 13 institutions that will receive funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be part of a national network of centers focused on predicting and responding to future disease outbreaks...
The 13 institutions, or funded partners of the CDC, will receive a total of $250 million in grants over five years to establish their own centers and work alongside the CDC and state and local health departments.The funding comes from the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, a federal initiative launched in April 2022 to enhance the nation’s ability to respond to public health threats with timely, effective decision-making informed by data, modeling and analytics.'
All of this work has led Professor Eisenberg to be sought out as an expert on wastewater surveillance. First quoted in the New York Times in May of 2023 in 'As Covid Emergency Ends, Surveillance Shifts to the Sewers' and in January of 2024 she was again was quoted by the New York Times in 'We Are in a Big Covid Wave. But Just How Big?' In the article, Marisa explains how her lab is trying to come up with a better measurement from wastewaster surveillance - the equivalent of the 'per-capita case count', which the technique has been lacking:
What experts really want to know, said Marisa Eisenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan who runs a wastewater monitoring lab for five sites, is how much virus there is relative to the number of people around — the wastewater equivalent of the per-capita case count.
Some labs “normalize” the data — that is, they adjust the denominator — by looking at the number of gallons flowing through the plant, Professor Eisenberg said. But many sites use something called “pepper mild mottle virus,” a virus that infects pepper plants.
“People have studied this in human sewage and found we shed pretty consistent levels of this pepper virus,” she said. “So that’s a measurement of how many people went to the bathroom in the sewer shed today.”Once Professor Eisenberg’s team normalizes the results, it sends data to the state and to the C.D.C., which collects information from sites across the country that together account for about 40 percent of the U.S. population.
The Center for the Study of Complex Systems is extremely proud of Dr. Eisenberg's work in public engagement; her work as Director of the Center, and continuing to be an exceptional mentor to so many. It's just hard to keep up with the news!
