Epidemiological Insights and Methodologies in Wastewater Surveillance: Sustainability in Wastewater Monitoring

Wastewater-based epidemiology has gained significant recognition as a population-level public health surveillance tool, providing timely and cost-effective insights into the burden of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and chemical threats within communities served by centralized wastewater systems. The COVID-19 pandemic markedly accelerated the global adoption of wastewater surveillance programs, demonstrating their value for early warning and trend monitoring. However, the long-term sustainability of these programs — particularly across diverse population groups including rural, indigenous, immigrant, and other underserved communities — remains insufficiently characterized in the scientific literature. Ensuring equitable and durable wastewater monitoring requires an integrated understanding of the methodological, logistical, ethical, and resource-related factors that govern program viability across different settings.Despite growing interest, the evidence base on sustainable wastewater surveillance is fragmented and lacks a unified framework. Critical gaps persist regarding how wastewater monitoring can be adapted and maintained in low-resource environments, how ethical and equity considerations should be incorporated into program design, and how surveillance findings can be translated into actionable public health responses for communities that are often overlooked in mainstream epidemiological research. A centralized body of evidence addressing these challenges would substantially benefit researchers, public health practitioners, and policymakers working to advance wastewater-based epidemiology as a durable and equitable public health strategy.This Research Topic aims to coalesce current research and advance the science of wastewater surveillance across diverse populations and resource contexts. By bringing together epidemiological, methodological, and public health perspectives, it seeks to establish a shared knowledge base that captures the challenges, opportunities, and ethical dimensions of sustainable wastewater monitoring. Contributions applying field-based approaches, novel analytical methodologies, and interdisciplinary frameworks are encouraged, with a particular focus on underserved and underrepresented communities.This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, technical communications, reviews, and commentaries addressing the sustainability of wastewater surveillance across varied community types and disease contexts. We particularly encourage contributions from or about communities that are typically underrepresented in wastewater surveillance research.We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: - Wastewater surveillance programs in low-resource communities, including rural and geographically isolated settings, indigenous communities, and immigrant populations- Methodological approaches for monitoring infectious diseases, chemical analytes, and antimicrobial resistance markers in resource-constrained or infrastructurally challenging environments- Ethical, equity, and community engagement considerations in surveillance program design and implementation- Analytical and sampling innovations enabling sustainable monitoring across diverse community structures- Extrapolation and generalizability of wastewater surveillance findings across different population types- Policy frameworks and public health decision-making informed by wastewater-based epidemiological data Topic editors: Erick Butler, Anna Gitter, Kristina Dawn Mena, Michelle Crum Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82626/epidemiological-insights-and-methodologies-in-wastewater-surveillance-sustainability-in-wastewater-monitoring