23
Jan

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the limitations of current disease surveillance methods in identifying and tracking health threats. This crisis, along with persistent difficulties in combatting other infectious diseases, highlights the imperative to rethink global disease surveillance. The urgency is intensified by climate change, which is disrupting established disease patterns and altering the behavior of pathogens due to shifting weather patterns and extreme events. Comprehensive and real time data is the missing piece that the global health community desperately needs to be prepared to detect and respond to human health threats.

Wastewater surveillance has the potential to transform global disease surveillance capacity. The evidence is clear: it has been used for decades to detect and contain poliovirus outbreaks, and now is being applied to monitor multiple pathogens and detect variants. As a cost-effective tool, it is being deployed across countries with diverse sanitation systems and variable clinical diagnostic capacity.   

There remains a critical need to empower and enable countries to stand up, scale and sustain wastewater programs. Leadership from multilateral organizations and national public health agencies will be essential for closing the gap between evidence and implementation. This multidisciplinary policy forum will draw on lessons learned from other transformative global health initiatives and explore pathways for scaling and sustaining wastewater surveillance globally. 

Selected readings:

• Diamond, Megan B., et al. "Wastewater surveillance facilitates climate change–resilient pathogen monitoring." Science Translational Medicine 15.718 (2023): eadi7831.
• Keshaviah, Aparna, et al. "Wastewater monitoring can anchor global disease surveillance systems." The Lancet Global Health 11.6 (2023): e976-e981.
• Takeda, T., et al. "Governance of wastewater surveillance systems to minimize the impact of COVID-19 and future epidemics: cases across Asia-Pacific." Environmental Resilience and Transformation in Times of COVID-19. Elsevier, 2021. 115-126.
• Wannigama, Dhammika Leshan, et al. "Tracing the transmission of mpox through wastewater surveillance in Southeast Asia." Journal of travel medicine 30.5 (2023): taad096.
• Wolfe, Marlene K., et al. "Wastewater detection of emerging arbovirus infections: Case study of Dengue in the United States." Environmental Science & Technology Letters (2023).

Learn more about The Rockefeller Foundation's Wastewater Surveillance Program: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/initiative/wastewater-surveillance/ & the recent Wastewater Surveillance event hosted between The Rockefeller Foundation and The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust: https://jcwastewater2023.com/