Check out the participation of Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin and Dr. Carolyn Prouse in the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (NSF RCN) webinar on wastewater-based epidemiology, which took place on February 5th, 2024.
In March 2022, the Water Environment Federation hosted the Wastewater Disease Surveillance Summit in Cincinnati, Ohio. This summit was one of the first conferences in the water industry to focus on surveillance for tracking population health rather than traditional topics like water quality. The event brought together experts from various disciplines to share experiences in wastewater surveillance, epidemiology, and intelligence, which involves examining microbial life and chemical compounds in sewage as biomarkers of human and environmental health. Once considered potentially harmful or worthless, sewage materials are now considered valuable public health information sources. While wastewater surveillance has been used on a smaller scale for diseases like polio for decades, its robust and scalable application for COVID-19 trends emerged in 2020.