Wastewater surveillance: UKHSA expands programme to detect major health threats

UK officials are expanding wastewater and environmental surveillance to detect more dangerous pathogens that they say pose a significant public health threat.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said that the new tool, called PRISM (Pathogen Risk Intelligence through Surveillance and Modelling), can detect multiple known and unknown threats from a single sample using sophisticated detection technologies.This contrasts with existing UK wastewater surveillance schemes that only target specific diseases such as polio.As part of the expansion, surveillance will be extended beyond traditional large wastewater sites to new settings such as hospitals, transport hubs, and other high footfall locations.By using advances in sequencing and molecular genomics, the new technology could potentially identify viruses such as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, and Lassa fever from one sample, should they ever emerge in the UK. It can also track seasonal viruses, such as norovirus in wastewater, and distinguish between different strains circulating…