Summit County health officials are using a new strategy to track drug trends and prevent overdoses: wastewater monitoring.

The county is working with a national wastewater analysis platform, Biobot Analytics, to test for dozens of substances, including fentanyl, meth, cocaine and nicotine.

Samples are collected weekly from the Akron Water Reclamation Facility, which serves 330,000 households across the county, said Cory Kendrick, director of community strategy and systems at Summit County Public Health.

“It is truly the best, robust, anonymous data we can get,” Kendrick said. “There’s no way to identify who or where these samples are coming from, but it does give us an idea of our largest population base.”

The analyses will allow officials to monitor potential spikes in certain substan

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