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Review
. 2022 Dec:15:100405.
doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2022.100405. Epub 2022 May 30.

Centralized and decentralized wastewater-based epidemiology to infer COVID-19 transmission - A brief review

José Gonçalves  1   2 , Andrés Torres-Franco  1   2 , Elisa Rodriguéz  1   2 , Israel Diaz  1   2 , Tom Koritnik  3 , Priscilla Gomes da Silva  4   5   6 , João R Mesquita  4 , Marija Trkov  3 , Metka Paragi  3 , Raúl Muñoz  1   2 , Pedro A García-Encina  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Centralized and decentralized wastewater-based epidemiology to infer COVID-19 transmission - A brief review

José Gonçalves et al. One Health. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

Wastewater-based epidemiology has shown to be a promising and innovative approach to measure a wide variety of illicit drugs that are consumed in the communities. In the same way as for illicit drugs, wastewater-based epidemiology is a promising approach to understand the prevalence of viruses in a community-level. The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created an unprecedented burden on public health and diagnostic laboratories all over the world because of the need for massive laboratory testing. Many studies have shown the applicability of a centralized wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) approach, where samples are collected at WWTPs. A more recent concept is a decentralized approach for WBE where samples are collected at different points of the sewer system and at polluted water bodies. The second being particularly important in countries where there are insufficient connections from houses to municipal sewage pipelines and thus untreated wastewater is discharged directly in environmental waters. A decentralized approach can be used to focus the value of diagnostic tests in what we call targeted-WBE, by monitoring wastewater in parts of the population where an outbreak is likely to happen, such as student dorms, retirement homes and hospitals. A combination of centralized and decentralized WBE should be considered for an affordable, sustainable, and successful WBE implementation in high-, middle- and low-income countries.

Keywords: COVID-19; Disease; Prevalence; SARS-CoV-2; Surveillance; Wastewater-based epidemiology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Main steps of a WBE approach with their main challenges (green box) and common methods (blue box). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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