Wastewater-borne viruses and bacteria, surveillance and biosensors at the interface of academia and field deployment

Abstract

Wastewater is a complex, but an ideal, matrix for disease monitoring and surveillance as it represents the entire load of enteric pathogens from a local catchment area. It captures both clinical and community disease burdens. Global interest in wastewater surveillance has been growing rapidly for infectious diseases monitoring and for providing an early warning of potential outbreaks. Although molecular detection methods show high sensitivity and specificity in pathogen monitoring from wastewater, they are strongly limited by challenges, including expensive laboratory settings and prolonged sample processing and analysis. Alternatively, biosensors exhibit a wide range of practical utility in real-time monitoring of biological and chemical markers. However, field deployment of biosensors is primarily challenged by prolonged sample processing and pathogen concentration steps due to complex wastewater matrices. This review summarizes the role of wastewater surveillance and provides an overview of infectious viral and bacterial pathogens with cutting-edge technologies for their detection. It emphasizes the practical utility of biosensors in pathogen monitoring and the major bottlenecks for wastewater surveillance of pathogens, and overcoming approaches to field deployment of biosensors for real-time pathogen detection. Furthermore, the promising potential of novel machine learning algorithms to resolve uncertainties in wastewater data is discussed.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Wastewater
• environmental surveillance
• water
• contamination
• epidemics
• human health
• healthcare
• virus
• bacteria
• biosensor

Disclosure statement

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through “Development of sterilizing system for infection-related medical wastes optimized for hospital scale” and “Aquatic Ecosystem Conservation Research Program”, funded by Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) (No. RS-2021-KE001694, 2020003030006).