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CWBE
The Centre of Excellence in Water-Based Early-Warning Systems for Health Protection, (CWBE), will develop a public health surveillance system to detect outbreaks of diseases by testing water systems for traces of pathogens or other biomarkers at a community level. This could help prevent future pandemics from spreading by detecting them early, and will provide better understanding of chronic, non-communicable diseases such as diabetes.
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the potential to revolutionise healthcare and environmental sectors as it provides (near) real-time and cost effective community-wide public health diagnostics. Urban water contains a complex mixture of human excretion products, endogenously formed metabolic residues, oxidative stress markers, genes, inflammation proteins, as well as exogenous stressors such as hazardous chemicals and pathogens.
As whole communities contribute to wastewater, its monitoring is several orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than clinical screening (as manifested during the Covid pandemic). WBE is comprehensive and unbiased; it does not miss asymptomatic cases or communities reluctant to be tested or lacking basic testing infrastructure. By using wastewater-based epidemiology we democratise healthcare.
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