College of Engineering Faculty Lecture Series: Enhancing Public Health Through Wastewater Surveillance

Enhancing Public Health Through Wastewater Surveillance
Presented by Tyler Radniecki, Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering

Wastewater is a public health database waiting to be read, and the tool used to read this database is called wastewater surveillance. Within a single sample of wastewater, the aggregated public health data of an entire community is stored. For infectious disease, that public health data includes both the presence of a given pathogen and the qualitative disease burden of that pathogen in the community. When wastewater samples are taken and analyzed over time, infection waves can be monitored, and intervention strategies and policies can be evaluated. In these ways, wastewater surveillance works as a complementary data stream to enhance existing public health surveillance systems.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater surveillance has proven to be technically feasible, reliable, sensitive, and cost-effective. However, the successful implementation of wastewater surveillance into the public health field required more than technical capabilities. It required coalition building, communication, and the co-production of knowledge among numerous stakeholders, including researchers, public health officials, wastewater utilities, city, county and state officials, and the general public.

This presentation covers how wastewater surveillance in Oregon went from an academic research project to a state-wide implementation in a matter of months. What started as monitoring SARS-CoV-2 has now expanded to include influenza, RSV, bird flu, measles, and more. Additionally, this presentation describes how our intentional and consistent collaboration between varied stakeholders helped Oregon create one of the strongest wastewater surveillance networks in the country. Finally, this presentation points out where wastewater surveillance is heading in the future.