WastewaterSCAN is a national leader in advancing the science of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) to generate actionable public-health insights.
Since the program’s inception during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, WastewaterSCAN has led WBE’s evolution from an obscure, occasionally used scientific tool to a rigorous, widely accepted approach for comprehensive disease monitoring.
WastewaterSCAN has published all of its findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals, many with collaborators from other academic institutions located worldwide, employees of CDC, and experts from local and state public health departments and wastewater utilities, underscoring the program’s commitment to facilitating adoption and routine use of WBE tools by public health agencies around the world.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, WBE was an obscure, underdeveloped disease monitoring tool. Today, it’s a robust, widely vetted tool for monitoring more than a dozen disease targets, and WastewaterSCAN has played a leading role in making these advances possible.
Shortly after the pandemic’s onset in 2019, the researchers behind WastewaterSCAN recognized that scientists would need to provide the public health community with reliable, standardized wastewater monitoring methods – methods that would pave the way to apply WBE science to monitor a range of disease targets.
WastewaterSCAN soon emerged at the international forefront of wastewater method development, designing and vetting a suite of wastewater collection, processing and analysis protocols. Along the way, WastewaterSCAN demonstrated the advantages of monitoring wastewater solids instead of liquids – a method that has been implemented across WastewaterSCAN’s national-scale, multi-disease WBE monitoring network. WastwaterSCAN also has led the global WBE research community in investigating issues affecting the performance of WBE methods, in enhancing how WBE data get reported, and in expanding WBE monitoring beyond COVID-19 to about a dozen other diseases.
Public health agencies and wastewater treatment operators rely on the WBE data and insights developed, vetted and published by WastewaterSCAN as the scientific foundation for incorporating wastewater monitoring into their routine disease monitoring activities.
To read more and access the amazing information they're continuing to provide click on this link: https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
