Centre of Excellence in Water-Based Early-Warning Systems for Health protection.

As pioneers of WBE we are fully aware of the acute conceptual and technological challenges that are preventing this rapidly developing area from reaching its full potential – to transform public health surveillance globally. Current wastewater monitoring tools, as shown during the COVID pandemics, are laborious, laboratory based, focus on a small subset of biomarkers with results slowly communicated to decisionmakers costing crucial time (often several days) in a pandemic. Lack of holistic thinking encompassing better understanding of human – environment interactions, further hampers our ability for agile responses to arising public health and wider sustainability threats.

To unlock the full potential of wastewater we will develop, with critical input from regional / national stakeholders, the first One Health Platform (One Health Observatory) encompassing WBE systems, sensing technologies and efficient modelling workflows to gather data and monitor environmental and public health, including disease emergence and dynamics via continuous, spatiotemporal multi-residue biomarker tracking.