A-Z Index × Submit A-Z Index × Submit A-Z Index Search Dropdown × Submit Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate Emerging Infectious Disease journal ISSN: 1080-6059 Disclaimer: Early release articles are not considered as final versions. Any changes will be reflected in the online version in the month the article is officially released.
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The National Wastewater Surveillance System represents a groundbreaking initiative aimed at enhancing public health surveillance for infectious diseases through wastewater analyses. We have outlined current and planned collaborative efforts between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and key partners, including academic institutions, utilities, jurisdictions, and public health partner networks, to develop, implement, and sustain wastewater surveillance for infectious diseases to inform public health activities. By addressing critical challenges in assay development, community and clinician engagement, governance structures, public health ethics, data system development and integration, and innovation fostering, those partnerships lay the groundwork for a robust public health surveillance framework. Establishing this novel public health surveillance capability required developing new partnerships and skills, incorporating basic principles of public health surveillance, validating assays, and envisioning a system to meet current and future public health challenges. This capability will foster improved public health responses nationwide.
Public health surveillance is essential for monitoring health trends, detecting outbreaks, and informing and evaluating public health responses. A critical public health innovation from the COVID-19 pandemic was the establishment of wastewater surveillance for infectious diseases in communities across the United States. Wastewater surveillance detects pathogens anonymously in community wastewater to increase understanding of community disease spread and transmission. This system complements traditional public health surveillance that relies on clinical testing of symptomatic patients who seek medical care and syndromic surveillance during patient visits to medical facilities. Because wastewater surveillance is a relatively new capability, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked with key partners to address multiple challenges to effectively implement and sustain a national public health wastewater surveillance system; validating laboratory assays that could reliably detect pathogens in wastewater and developing reasonable signal thresholds; establishing a network of wastewater utility partners to provide samples; setting up data systems that provide real-time, bi-directional data; increasing wastewater surveillance capacity and training for the public health workforce; developing the science base, innovation, and ethical framework for wastewater surveillance; and providing response tools for state, territorial, local, and tribal (STLT) health departments to respond to infectious disease threats detected through wastewater surveillance, including tools for engagement with local communities and healthcare providers.
Figure . Visualization of the connections between the multiple partners needed to implement and sustain wastewater surveillance to aid public health actions in the United States. CDC, Centers for Disease Control and...
The success of adding wastewater surveillance as an innovative publ…