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Application of Wastewater Surveillance in Public Health

Participating journal: Discover Public Health

Wastewater surveillance has emerged as a critical tool for public health monitoring, offering unique insights into community health trends and emerging infectious diseases. By analyzing pathogens and biomarkers in wastewater, public health officials can assess disease prevalence, substance use patterns, and overall community health—an approach that has proven invaluable during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This collection aims to facilitate knowledge exchange among researchers, public health practitioners, and policymakers on the public health applications of wastewater analysis. We welcome submissions that focus on the technical, ethical, and policy dimensions of wastewater surveillance as they relate to public health preparedness and response, including case studies, methodological innovations, and collaborative frameworks.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Wastewater surveillance for infectious disease detection and public health monitoring

• Methodological innovations in wastewater analysis with direct public health applications

• Integration of wastewater data into public health surveillance systems and decision-making processes

• Ethical and policy considerations in implementing wastewater-based epidemiology

• Case studies demonstrating the impact of wastewater surveillance on public health interventions

Keywords:public health, wastewater surveillance, surveillance system, epidemiology, community health

Participating journal

Submit your manuscript to this collection through the participating journal.

Editors

  • Phong Thai

    Phong Thai

    Associate Professor, The University of Queensland, Australia. Dr. Phong Thai is an ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellow and Associate Professor at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS), University of Queensland. He focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology to estimate community consumption and exposure to substances like tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals, and to monitor Covid-19 infection during the pandemic. He also works on projects monitoring the occurrence, fate, and transport of environmental pollutants in various matrices.
  • Masaaki Kitajima

    Masaaki Kitajima

    Professor, The University of Tokyo, Japan. Masaaki Kitajima is a Professor, lead of the Laboratory of International Wastewater-based Epidemiology at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Prof. Kitajima received a Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Tokyo, with major research interest is environmental and public health microbiology. He is a leading scientist in wastewater surveillance of pathogen in Japan and globally, particularly on Covid-19 monitoring.

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