wastewater surveillance programs are now adding monkeypox, a viral disease related to smallpox, to their testing efforts. The most popular use of wastewater surveillance today has been for infectious diseases - but not only COVID-19. Wastewater surveillance is being carried out in at least 63 other countries, according to the COVIDPoops19 dashboard, an effort by University of California-Merced researchers to track COVID-19 wastewater data worldwide. There are currently hundreds of wastewater surveillance programs with thousands of sampling sites worldwide. (Because the RNA is only a genetic remnant of the virus, those handling wastewater as part of their jobs are not at risk of infection.) Now, the practice is informing the public health efforts of several communities, while also being used to track new incidents of disease.
Wastewater surveillance has been used to track these items, as well as antimicrobial-resistance and chemical exposures, but it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the practice saw an explosion in its popularity, since infected individuals shed SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) RNA in their feces. “There are papers looking at sewage surveillance for polio in 1939 in the United States, and it’s something that’s gotten a bit more attention since about 2001 when academic researchers started kind of talking about using wastewater to track pharmaceutical use and illicit drug. “But it actually isn’t a new technology,” says Anna Mehrotra, director of the Water Environment Federation (WEF)’s wastewater surveillance program. It can be practiced in groups as small as passengers on an aircraft and communities as large as cities. When used specifically for diseases, it is also called wastewater-based epidemiology. The practice of using the information in wastewater for public health data is known as wastewater surveillance. It provides deep biological and chemical information on a community with fewer biases than many other types of public health surveillance. Wastewater is a rich source of information for community health.
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