Infectious disease surveillance through wastewater analysis

Wastewater-based surveillance has emerged as a powerful tool for monitoring public health and infectious disease dynamics. Wastewater serves as a collective pool of information, offering insights into the health of an entire community. This approach builds on the fact that individuals shed genetic material of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens through urine and/or feces. Thus, by analyzing wastewater, we can detect the presence of pathogens, monitor relative abundance, uncover genomic variation, and even predict outbreaks before clinical cases are reported. This makes wastewater a promising avenue for wide-scale genomic surveillance of pathogens.

Despite its promise, wastewater analysis for infectious disease surveillance faces several challenges. Experimentally, sample collection methods, preservation, and concentration techniques can introduce biases that affect the accuracy of results. Computationally, analyzing complex metagenomic data demands robust bioinformatics pipelines and reference databases. Finally, ethical concerns surrounding privacy, informed consent, policy development, and data sharing also require careful consideration. In order for wastewater sequencing to become a global, reliable, and adaptive early-warning system for pathogen surveillance, these challenges need to be addressed.

This workshop brings together scientists from diverse backgrounds to discuss the possibilities, limitations, and challenges of wastewater analysis and its applications. The main goal is to reach across disciplines to identify challenges and barriers to the implementation of wastewater analysis for the detection of known and emerging agents of concern. During the workshop we will, together, write a white paper that summarizes the challenges and opportunities, including perspectives from different fields, as a future guideline for research in wastewater surveillance.