Community Wastewater-based Infectious Disease Surveillance Phase 2: Report Release Webinar

Over 80 percent of U.S. households are connected to municipal wastewater collection systems, which contain the biological waste, including discharged pathogens, of the human populations they serve. Wastewater surveillance can be used to changing levels of a pathogen or identify newly emergent variants in a community. The National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) was launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and is now being used to detect other infectious diseases, such as Mpox.
A Phase 1 report released in early 2023 examined the usefulness of the NWSS beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, described the value of a robust national wastewater surveillance system, and provided recommendations to increase the public health impact of such a system. A new Phase 2 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examines the technical constraints and opportunities to improve wastewater surveillance for the prevention and control of infectious diseases in the U.S. Join us for our report release webinar, featuring key messages and recommendations from the report.