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Background
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a powerful approach for tracking public health threats through environmental monitoring. Our work in this field began over 15 years ago and has been supported by UK Research and Innovation (NERC, EPSRC), the Welsh Government, UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), DEFRA, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Food Standards Agency PathSafe programme. In an international context, our research and innovation is supported by the EU Horizon programme (BlueAdapt) and our ongoing partnership with the Alphabet company Verily Life Sciences LLC.
Through long-standing collaborations with Cardiff University, Arup, Public Health Wales, and other partners, our WBE capability played a key role in the national response to COVID-19 and continues to support surveillance of AMR and other emerging public and animal health risks both in the UK and overseas.
Waterborne and wastewater-associated pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), norovirus, and antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) organisms, represent major and ongoing threats to both public and animal health. Many of these pathogens, particularly those with zoonotic potential, are transmitted via contaminated water and food, often originating from human sewage, livestock waste, and mixed catchments where human, agricultural, and wildlife sources intersect. Viral outbreaks such as norovirus cause millions of illnesses globally each year, resulting in substantial healthcare and economic costs, while the spread of animal pathogens in the environment poses additional risks to food security, animal welfare, and disease spillover to humans. Antimicrobial resistance alone is projected to cost the global economy up to £100 trillion by 2050, highlighting the urgent need for robust, population-scale surveillance systems that adopt a One Health approach.
Climate change is expected to exacerbate these risks. Increased storm events, flooding, and population growth are placing additional pressure on wastewater infrastructure, while changing environmental conditions may increase the prevalence and persistence of animal- and water-borne diseases. At the same time, new and re-emerging viruses, some capable of evading existing vaccines or linked to environmental exposure (e.g. rotavirus and human papillomaviruses) or animal spillover (e.g., avian flu), further highlight the need for proactive monitoring and mitigation.
In response to these challenges, WBE provides a scalable, evidence-based solution to monitor pathogenic organisms in wastewater and assess the risks they pose to public health. Supported by UKRI, government bodies, the water industry, and the EU, our team is advancing and refining WBE methods to deliver rapid, reliable data that inform public health decision-making and help safeguard communities now and in the future.
Our core capabilities
Developing integrated, One Health tools to quantify human and animal pathogens in seawater, freshwater, sediments, wastewater influent and effluent, and shellfish. These tools simultaneously monitor antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes and can be integrated with syndromic, clinical, and chemical datasets to generate actionable intelligence for public and animal health.
Advancing environmental health monitoring by assessing the persistence, infectivity, and dispersal of microbial pathogens and AMR; evaluating the value of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) for public and animal health surveillance; and identifying effective strategies for communicating WBE findings to stakeholders to support evidence-based decision-making.
Creating predictive models to assess the transport and fate of microbial pathogens and AMR through wastewater systems, rivers, and coastal zones; incorporating climate change, hydrology, and tidal influences; and integrating environmental, weather, and clinical data to enable near real-time forecasting for proactive risk management.
Collaborating with public health agencies, regulators, utilities, industry, and communities to co-design and implement WBE solutions; translating environmental and clinical data into actionable guidance; and supporting decision-making for disease surveillance, outbreak response, and environmental risk mitigation.