Hub Deputy Director awarded Queen’s Anniversary Prize
Professor Davey Jones’s team at Bangor University have been recognised with the presentation of a Queen’s Anniversary Prize medal and certificate at Buckingham Palace, for their work for the benefit of public health
The Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education are part of the UK’s Honours system and are awarded every two years by the Sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister following a rigorous, independent review process managed by The Royal Anniversary Trust, an independent charity.
Bangor University was recognised for its novel system for public health surveillance through the analysis of harmful pathogens in wastewater, deployed nationally during the pandemic and now adapted to measure a wide range of public health indicators.
Professor Davey Jones (Head of waste water research team, Bangor University; and Deputy Director of the Digital Health Hub for AMR) said, “Faced with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, we knew from previous research that there was a possibility we could harness the power of wastewater to track the spread of the virus, and we were able to do just that. This shed light on the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, but also the transformative potential of wastewater-based epidemiology in safeguarding public health”.
Since then, and on behalf of Welsh Government, the Food Standards Agency and European Union, the technology has been expanded to monitor a wide range of public health indicators including enterovirus, norovirus, influenza, RSV, polio and antimicrobial resistant organisms. This is now being built into a real-time alerting system for healthcare facilities and public health agencies. The technology is also being used to predict the potential for individuals to become infected from coming into contact with sewage contaminated water (e.g. open water swimming), helping to sever the disease reinfection cycle.
Jones’ work in the Digital Health Hub for AMR focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology for AMR – linking community and hospital AMR data. Partnering with Welsh government, Public Health Wales and ARUP, his team plan to develop a data dashboard to visualise AMR wastewater data from Wales, leveraging a major national programme led by Jones tracking 384 antimicrobial resistant genes using high throughput qPCR across 47 sites covering 80% of the population and 7 major hospitals.
Prof Jones’ team also won the Overall Impact Award from The Natural Environment Research Council for their project, ‘Using wastewater to monitor the nation’s health: onwards from COVID-19'. His team used their expertise to monitor the prevalence of COVID-19, at one point covering 80% of the UK population, through wastewater monitoring. The monitoring system played a crucial role in shaping national policy during the pandemic, and has since been adapted to measure many other diseases of public health concern in the UK and globally.