Enabling future implementation of One Health Surveillance systems through enhanced training programme for urban wastewater watch

Rapidly after the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemics in 2020, there has been increasing evidence that the monitoring of viruses in wastewater was able to inform valuably on the contamination dynami...

We wanted to create an online learning platform to support the European efforts in implementing WBE. OneHealthWatch aimed at developing a practical training programme for harmonized and standardized wastewater surveillance, to enable contamination detection at national scale in the different European Member States. The training modules aimed at understanding the general purpose of WBE, learning the sampling and analysis methods of wastewater or knowing the ethical aspects at stake with WBE. Our goal was to unify the knowledge about WBE among diverse concerned populations: workers in wastewater management, health professionals dealing with pandemic management as well as general public in order to allow a social acceptance of the methodology. Harmonization of the methods and approaches are thought to facilitate data and results exchanges between wastewater and health sectors at regional/national scale. Finally, the multilingual approach, with largely spoken language as English, Spanish, French and German, was though to allow dissemination of the platform on other parts of the world as Latin America and North America, “Francophonie”, especially in Africa.