Wastewater-Based Epidemiology for Infectious Disease Surveillance
A special issue of Environments (ISSN 2076-3298).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 June 2023) | Viewed by 17061
Special Issue Editors
Interests: water-borne pathogens; pathogen fate and transport; watershed protection; water treatment; water and wastewater surveillance; environmental biotechnology
Interests: RNA biology; ribosome heterogeneity; ribosome-mediated gene regulation; bacteriophage–host interactions; phage biology
Interests: environmental surveillance; viruses; water-borne pathogens; wastewater; water quality; environmental health; molecular techniques; metagenomics
2. Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering, Lulea university of technology, 97187 Lulea, Sweden
Interests: sources, behaviour and fate of diffuse urban pollutants; sustainable drainage systems; risk assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), or environmental surveillance, has been used to better understand disease transmission for decades, and its application for the protection of public health has gained heightened attention in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. While the presence of pathogens in wastewater is well established, the ways in which these pathogens can inform community health trends (and thus contribute to the development of public health team responses) is currently the focus of extensive global research efforts. Much of the current research is dedicated to studying the potential for the wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA to serve as an early diagnostic tool to identify new outbreaks and/or changes in the transmission of COVID-19 in a community. However, wastewater surveillance has also been used in the past to provide early warnings of infectious disease outbreaks caused by poliovirus, hepatitis A and E viruses, enterovirus, and norovirus. The potential of WBE to enhance our understanding of well-known and emerging infectious diseases warrants further investigation. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, critical questions remain regarding the effect of spatial and temporal environmental factors on the relationship between viral RNA concentrations in wastewater and COVID-19 transmission in a community, as well as the use of WBE within a public health context—in other words, which data are useful to public health teams and what should their response be? What are the ethical implications? We are inviting papers for this Special Issue that explore the utility of wastewater surveillance for detecting pathogens at a community or near source scale to better understand infectious disease transmission, as well as the use of WBE data to protect public health; papers describing method development for the quantification of pathogens in wastewater matrices are also welcome.
Dr. Kristen Jellison
Dr. Vassie Ware
Dr. Tiong Gim Aw
Prof. Dr. Lian Lundy
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Environments is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- wastewater
- wastewater-based epidemiology
- environmental surveillance
- pathogens
- epidemiology
- public health
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