Literature review: Substance and infectious disease surveillance from wastewater-based epidemiology

¹ School of Energy and Environment, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China
² State Key Laboratory of Environmental Medicine Engineering, Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, P.R. China
³ State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210096, P.R. China
⁴ Taihu Basin Monitoring Center of Hydrology and Water Resources, Wuxi, 214024, P.R. China
⁵ Key Laboratory of Taihu Basin Water Resources Management and Protection of the Ministry of Water Resources, Wuxi, 214024, P.R. China

^a xiliulin@seu.edu.cn
^b* Corresponding author’s email: Env_Health_SEU@163.com

Abstract

As the scale of illicit drug abuse and the expansion of pandemic diseases increase, traditional epidemiological surveillance methods are unable to meet the demand of massive real-time observations. The promising approach of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) as an effective supplement to traditional surveillance methods relates domestic wastewater to the information of the population within a determined sewer collection area, as its advantages of non-privacy, low-cost and high-efficiency. Resorting to detection and analysis of wastewater samples, the consumption and dispersion of an epidemic substance in a community can be inverse-calculated in an easy way. This review introduces the origin and development of WBE to emerge the great potential of WBE in applications, and recommends basic procedures and calculation methods. Then we focus on its role in monitoring the consumption of some substances (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, sedative narcotic drugs, illicit psychotropic drugs, and synthetic chemicals) and its forewarning signal in epidemic, and finally provides insight into challenges and prospectives.