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COVID-19 crisis creates Opportunity towards global monitoring & surveillance

COVID-19 crisis creates Opportunity towards global monitoring & surveillance
COVID-19 crisis creates Opportunity towards global monitoring & surveillance

The spectrum of emerging new diseases as well as re-emerging old diseases is broadening as infectious agents evolve, adapt, and spread at enormous speeds in response to changing ecosys-tems. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a recent phenomenon and may take a while to understand its transmission routes from less traveled territories, ranging from fomite exposure routes to wastewater transmission. The critical challenge is how to negotiate with such catastrophic pandemics in high-income countries (HICs ~20% of the global population) and low-and middle-income countries (LMICs ~ 80% of the global population) with a total global population size of approximately eight billion, where practical mass testing and tracing is only a remote possibility, particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Keeping in mind the population distribution disparities of high-income countries (HICs) and LMICs and urbanisation trends over recent years, traditional wastewater-based surveillance such as that used to combat polio may help in addressing this challenge. The COVID-19 era differs from any previous pandemics or global health challenges in the sense that there is a great deal of curiosity within the global community to find out everything about this virus, ranging from diagnostics, potential vaccines/therapeutics, and possible routes of transmission. In this regard, the fact that the gut is the common niche for both poliovirus and SARS-CoV-2, and due to the shedding of the virus through faecal material into sew-erage systems, the need for long-term wastewater surveillance and developing early warning systems for better preparedness at local and global levels is increasingly apparent. This paper aims to provide an insight into the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, how it can be managed, and what measures are required to deal with a current global international public health concern. Additionally, it shed light on the importance of using wastewater surveillance strategy as an early warning practical tool suitable for massive passive screening, as well as the urgent need for microfluidic technology as a rapid and cost-effective approach tracking SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater.

Lab-on-a-chip, Microbial forensics, Next generation monitoring tools, PCR, Preparedness, RT-LAMP, SARS-CoV-2, Wastewater surveillance, Waterborne pathogens
2076-0817
1-28
Donia, Ahmed
06fe19f6-6d02-485d-ad53-6f9b006129e8
Hassan, Sammer-Ul
8a5ae3f1-3451-4093-879e-85f40953da8b
Zhang, Xunli
d7cf1181-3276-4da1-9150-e212b333abb1
Al-Madboly, Lamiaa
d26ff6cd-6072-427d-8add-74c91272304c
Bokhari, Habib
1c3a1e18-4570-4a10-9feb-cea4218a275f
Donia, Ahmed
06fe19f6-6d02-485d-ad53-6f9b006129e8
Hassan, Sammer-Ul
8a5ae3f1-3451-4093-879e-85f40953da8b
Zhang, Xunli
d7cf1181-3276-4da1-9150-e212b333abb1
Al-Madboly, Lamiaa
d26ff6cd-6072-427d-8add-74c91272304c
Bokhari, Habib
1c3a1e18-4570-4a10-9feb-cea4218a275f

Donia, Ahmed, Hassan, Sammer-Ul, Zhang, Xunli, Al-Madboly, Lamiaa and Bokhari, Habib (2021) COVID-19 crisis creates Opportunity towards global monitoring & surveillance. Pathogens, 10 (3), 1-28, [256]. (doi:10.3390/pathogens10030256).

Record type: Review

Abstract

The spectrum of emerging new diseases as well as re-emerging old diseases is broadening as infectious agents evolve, adapt, and spread at enormous speeds in response to changing ecosys-tems. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a recent phenomenon and may take a while to understand its transmission routes from less traveled territories, ranging from fomite exposure routes to wastewater transmission. The critical challenge is how to negotiate with such catastrophic pandemics in high-income countries (HICs ~20% of the global population) and low-and middle-income countries (LMICs ~ 80% of the global population) with a total global population size of approximately eight billion, where practical mass testing and tracing is only a remote possibility, particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Keeping in mind the population distribution disparities of high-income countries (HICs) and LMICs and urbanisation trends over recent years, traditional wastewater-based surveillance such as that used to combat polio may help in addressing this challenge. The COVID-19 era differs from any previous pandemics or global health challenges in the sense that there is a great deal of curiosity within the global community to find out everything about this virus, ranging from diagnostics, potential vaccines/therapeutics, and possible routes of transmission. In this regard, the fact that the gut is the common niche for both poliovirus and SARS-CoV-2, and due to the shedding of the virus through faecal material into sew-erage systems, the need for long-term wastewater surveillance and developing early warning systems for better preparedness at local and global levels is increasingly apparent. This paper aims to provide an insight into the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, how it can be managed, and what measures are required to deal with a current global international public health concern. Additionally, it shed light on the importance of using wastewater surveillance strategy as an early warning practical tool suitable for massive passive screening, as well as the urgent need for microfluidic technology as a rapid and cost-effective approach tracking SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater.

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More information

Published date: March 2021
Additional Information: Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords: Lab-on-a-chip, Microbial forensics, Next generation monitoring tools, PCR, Preparedness, RT-LAMP, SARS-CoV-2, Wastewater surveillance, Waterborne pathogens

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 450800
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/450800
ISSN: 2076-0817
PURE UUID: 4cf7ae0c-498f-4b06-89f2-0acd21a5041f
ORCID for Sammer-Ul Hassan: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-5814
ORCID for Xunli Zhang: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4375-1571

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 12 Aug 2021 16:30
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:10

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Contributors

Author: Ahmed Donia
Author: Xunli Zhang ORCID iD
Author: Lamiaa Al-Madboly
Author: Habib Bokhari

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