How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted wastewater-based epidemiology?

Monitoramento epidemiológico espaçotemporal de SARS-CoV-2 no esgoto de Curitiba-PR

“…Insta salientar que as perspectivas futuras de aplicação da EBE, notadamente a partir das bases espaçotemporais aqui tratadas, são bastante promissoras, em especial na identificação de potenciais surtos de doenças, da ocorrência de bactérias resistentes a antimicrobianos, informações sobre o uso de drogas e exposição a produtos químicos de forma geral (BARCELLOS et al, 2023).…”

“…No decorrer das últimas décadas, a EBE já vinha sendo utilizada em estudos epidemiológicos para fornecer informações sobre o uso de tabaco, álcool, drogas ilícitas, doenças infecciosas e produtos farmacêuticos controlados. Contudo, a partir de 2020, a pandemia de COVID-19 impulsionou o interesse e o uso dessa ferramenta com a finalidade de obter alertas precoces a partir de amostras de esgoto e dados provenientes de sistemas de esgotamento sanitário (ERICKSON et al, 2021;BARCELLOS et al, 2023). O monitoramento espaçotemporal da COVID-19 utilizando a EBE é uma abordagem que busca obter informações da distribuição dos casos em uma determinada região em função do tempo (CARITI et al, 2022).…”

A systematic review of influenza virus in water environments across human, poultry, and wild bird habitats

“…In terms of the chronology of studies on the occurrence of influenza virus in urban wastewater, the first investigation date back to 2009 ( Heijnen and Medema 2011b ), when researchers analyzed the presence of both common influenza A and the specific 2009 pandemic H1N1 strain in wastewater and surface water samples in the Netherlands. All other studies related to wastewater-based epidemiology for influenza viruses were published between 2022 and 2023, following the emergence of COVID-19, and the successful implementation of global environmental surveillance worldwide for this and other respiratory viruses ( Barcellos et al., 2023 ; Bhattacharya et al., 2021 ). Several studies have demonstrated indeed the potential of WBE to monitor and predict human influenza outbreaks using samples collected from wastewater treatment plants.…”

Food and Environmental Virology: Use of Passive Sampling to Characterize the Presence of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Viruses in Wastewater

“…Depending on local and temporal conditions, concentration of SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be associated with numbers of reported cases in the catchment area of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP; Ciannella et al, 2023 ). These findings trigger a significant development of wastewater epidemiology (WBE) with numerous studies dealing with methodic aspects of virus detection in wastewater, correlation of WBE data to reported clinical cases, and optimization efforts to adjust results (Barcellos et al, 2023 ). Wastewater-based investigations are relatively cost-effective and have great practical advantages in comparison to clinical data: independence from number and kind of testing regime in the population as well as coverage of persons with asymptomatic or subclinical manifestations of infection.…”