A healthcare privacy campaigner says technology created tracking the spread of COVID 19 is a new kind of surveillance that may be abused.
Phil Booth, the coordinator at MedConfidential, warned that enhanced monitoring of wastewater from sinks, drains & toilets, which could disclose infections and drug use, must be correctly regulated.
“The issues is elevated much more by the quest creep, the function creep, the methods in which these miniaturised technologies could get used as well as abused outside of the pandemic,” he said.
“There has to be regulation of any kind of technology which can have an impact on individuals lives and also on specific people.”
The statements of his stick to the launch by a biotech company of York of what it calls a “mobile surveillance platform” to identify COVID in sewage out of specific buildings.
The firm, Modern Water, says its fixed monitors are installed from 3,000 websites in sixty countries and could detect “medicines, personal care, pesticides, [as well as] hormones” inside wastewater.
It started testing its Microtox PD movable COVID monitoring program for UK municipal sewage treatment works the previous year.
Paul Ryan, chief business development officer in the firm’s parent company, Deepverge, told Sky News he expects the brand new unit being for hired within many weeks to observe COVID inside structures like hotels, hospitals, and schools.
“This is all about surveillance, this’s about determining the presence of other pathogens and COVID in front of time,” he said.
“I think there is a growing consensus that wastewater based epidemiology provides a complete new level of info allowing national health surveillance.”
