Alternative therapies that aid the body’s immune system to fight bacteria have shown promise in addressing the global threat of antibiotic resistance.

In response to physician shortages in certain specialties of medicine, as well as changes in federal student loan borrowing limits, the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine is joining the ranks of medical schools nationwide that offer an accelerated three-year MD degree.

“There are about 35 medical schools around the country that are doing this right now,” says Jennifer Adams, MD, professor of internal medicine, associate dean of medical education, clerkship phase, and director of accelerated pathway programs. “We're joining a small but mighty group that is trying to address two important factors. One is rising concerns around student debt and the cost of medical education, and the second thing is physician workforce shortages.”

Tracking the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, rather than just viral abundance, dramatically improves the ability to monitor and predict COVID-19 outbreaks, researchers report. Their study suggests that the new approach to wastewater pathogen surveillance could serve as a powerful predictive tool for public health, providing earlier and more accurate insight into emerging waves of infection. Monitoring pathogens in wastewater has become a powerful public health tool since the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a fast, cost-efficient, and potentially less biased way to track infectious diseases across scales. Because wastewater collects biological material from an entire population, a single sample can provide a broad snapshot of community-wide infection dynamics. Yet the standard methods used to estimate disease prevalence, which rely on measuring the amount of viral genetic material recovered from a given volume of wastewater, are vulnerable to limitations. Some measurements cannot be meaningfully compared across different pathogens or settings, while others are easily distorted by environmental factors like rainfall. According to Dustin Hill and colleagues, analyzing pathogen genetic diversity through whole-genome sequencing has the potential to overcome several of the limitations of traditional wastewater surveillance methods. They argue that changes in viral genetic diversity itself may serve as a meaningful indicator of shifts in disease spread within a population.

Here, Hill et al. introduce and validate a method for estimating the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 by analyzing the virus’s genetic diversity in wastewater. To evaluate this idea, Hill et al. retroactively applied and analyzed genetic diversity within SARS-CoV-2 from 12,290 wastewater samples collected between 2023 and 2025 from across New York state. They found that genetic diversity within a specific region of the viruses’ spike protein – the S1 NTD region – closely tracked real-world COVID-19 infection trends and, in many cases, correlated with disease activity more strongly than traditional wastewater metrics. Moreover, the authors’ statistical analyses revealed that diversity patterns in wastewater consistently preceded increases in COVID-related hospital admissions by one to two weeks, suggesting robust early warning signals of worsening disease spread. “The use of wastewater surveillance as a primary tool for monitoring population health is still a developing area,” write Justin Lessle and Ariel Christensen in a related Perspective. “Nevertheless, [this approach] has the potential to revolutionize infectious disease research and public health practice. Viral sequencing approaches such as that proposed by Hill et al. will be an important component of that success.”