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DOI

  • Kathrine O'Reilly
    London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
  • Matthew Wade
    UK Health Security Agency
  • Kata Farkas
  • Fabian Amman
    Austrian Academy of Sciences
  • Adrian Lison
    ETH Zürich
  • James Munday
    ETH Zürich
  • Jeremy Bingham
    Stellenbosch University
  • Zinhle Mthombothi
    Stellenbosch University
  • Z Fang
    Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland
  • C Brown
    UK Health Security Agency
  • Rowland Kao
    University of Edinburgh
  • L Danon
    Department of Engineering Mathematics, Bristol
Wastewater-based epidemiology is the detection of pathogens from sewage systems and the interpretation of these data to improve public health. Its use has increased in scope since 2020, when it was demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 RNA could be successfully extracted from the wastewater of affected populations. In this Perspective we provide an overview of recent advances in pathogen detection within wastewater, propose a framework for identifying the utility of wastewater sampling for pathogen detection and suggest areas where analytics require development. Ensuring that both data collection and analysis are tailored towards key questions at different stages of an epidemic will improve the inference made. For analyses to be useful we require methods to determine the absence of infection, early detection of infection, reliably estimate epidemic trajectories and prevalence, and detect of novel variants without reliance on consensus sequences. This research area has included many innovations that have improved the interpretation of collected data and we are optimistic that innovation will continue in the future.
Original languageEnglish
Article number100825
JournalEpidemics
Volume51
Early online date28 Mar 2025
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 28 Mar 2025
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