with Dr. Edwin Oh
UNLV School of Medicine
Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine
What if I told you that we could have avoided 300,000 infections and over 5,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Nevada? Or, perhaps, what if I told you that we did not have to lose $18.3 billion in gaming revenue in 2020 or face the highest unemployment rate in the country? Join us to learn more about how the Oh Lab of Neurogenetics and Precision Medicine has been developing new genomic tools to understand human diseases and to prevent major global pandemics from wreaking the havoc that we experienced in 2020. Using wastewater and diagnostic samples, the group has been able to show that SARS-CoV-2 counts and new viral variants can be detected early from wastewater samples collected from locations that include dormitories, sororities, homeless shelters, and major wastewater collection sites. Such tools can be used to provide early warning in the event of a biological attack such as an infectious disease.