WISE

The FGCZ is part of the project "WISE: Wastewater-based Infectious Disease Surveillance" together with EAWAG and D-BSSE. Goal of the project is to track infectious disease dynamics independent of clinical surveillance.

external pageSNF grantcall_made

external pageEawag project: SARS-CoV2 in Wastewatercall_made

Infectious disease dynamics and drivers are primarily inferred from clinical case data. When there are insufficiencies in clinical data collection (i.e., limited testing), disease dynamics remain incomplete or unobserved. Examples include dynamics of disease with mild-to-moderate health impacts or with high rates of asymptomatic infection. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) offers a complementary approach to track infectious disease dynamics independent from clinical surveillance. By tracking viral loads shed into wastewater by large populations within a catchment over time, we can infer and potentially predict previously unobserved epidemiological dynamics and their drivers. Here, we propose to advance the methods and analyses underlying wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance such that we obtain insights into the epidemiological dynamics of viruses beyond those achievable through clinical case surveillance alone.