American Journal of Water Science and Engineering

Special Issue

Perspectives of Wastewater-based Epidemiology (WBE) across Urban Water Systems

  • Submission Deadline: Feb. 28, 2022
  • Status: Submission Closed
  • Lead Guest Editor: Gaetano Crispino
About This Special Issue
Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the absolute importance of tracing the diffusion of infectious diseases on a vast population scale as rapidly as possible. At this regard, Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) was already recognized as a valid surveillance tool to detect viral loadings (polio, hepatitis A) in wastewaters flowing from the households to wastewater treatment plants. However, the implementation of WBE strategies to detect the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 in the sewer networks let instill doubt that the monitoring could be successful: is the SARS-CoV-2 degradation time sufficiently high to balance the transport time of wastewater flows from sewer domestic inlets to the measuring points? Which is the necessary information to be derived from measurements on wastewater samples? Where is it helpful to locate the monitoring points across the urban sewer networks? How convenient is the implementation of WBE compared with standard detection methods of Covid-19 diffusion, as rhino-pharyngeal swab samples? These are only a few open questions which the current experience can answer.
This special issue on “Perspectives of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) across urban water systems” just aims to collect latest worldwide real applications on the surveillance of wastewater to track the pandemic in urban basins served by wastewater collection systems. Field data derived from the real case studies will be welcome along with comprehensive reviews on the role played by WBE measures in the water sector against COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords:

  1. COVID-19
  2. Global Health
  3. Sewer Network
  4. Virus Concentration
  5. Wastewater-based Epidemiology
  6. Wastewater Surveillance
Lead Guest Editor
  • Gaetano Crispino

    Department of Engineering, Università degli Studi della Campania "L. Vanvitelli", Aversa, Italy