Wastewater surveillance is the process of monitoring wastewater for contaminants. Amongst other uses, it can be used for biosurveillance, to detect the presence of pathogens in local populations,[1] and to detect the presence of psychoactive drugs.[2]
One example of this is the use of wastewater monitoring to detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in populations during the COVID-19 pandemic.[3][4][5] In one study, wastewater surveillance showed signs of SARS-CoV-2 RNA before any cases were detected in the local population.[6]
Later in the pandemic, wastewater surveillance was demonstrated to be one technique to detect SARS-CoV-2 variants[7] and to monitor their spread in regions for studying related ongoing infection dynamics.[8][9][10] Comparison between case based epidemiological records and deep-sequenced wastewater samples validated that the composition of the virus population in the wastewater is in strong agreement with the virus variants circulating in the infected population.[11]
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