Environmental surveillance for non-sewered communities: A tool for disease mitigation in developing countries

Environmental surveillance and Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) has proven to a useful tool in fighting a pandemic. Recent application of techniques for SARS-CoV-2 detection in sewage has provided vital information on the emergence of disease, circulating variants of interest and variants of concern, and possibility of predicting hospital admissions. Developing countries do not have extensive sewer networks and therefore cannot use WBE for the same population scale. A South African study has successfully demonstrated the application of non-sewered surveillance across multiple sites and provinces in South Africa. To the authors’ knowledge, this has been the largest non sewered surveillance programme undertaken globally.