WP lead: The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, THL, Finland
Leader: Tarja Pitkanen
Objectives:
- Gather information on the existing clinical and environmental surveillance systems and specific needs for improvement
- Develop an environmental surveillance scheme to supplement the data from other infectious disease surveillance techniques at the selected study sites
- Prepare a handbook the analytical workflow for processing environmental samples, generating metagenomic sequence libraries and gathering all information generated for further use among the local health authorities and other stakeholders
- Collect the environmental surveillance data and testing in practice the developed environmental surveillance scheme at the study sites (larger + smaller city/country):
Potential priority Pathogens:
- Vibrio cholerae
- ESBL- E. coli
- CP Enterobacteriaceae
ODIN study locations and the local actors in charge of environmental sampling and microbiological investigations in Tanzania (TZ), DR Congo (DRC) and Burkina Faso (BF)
Connection of WP2 to other ODIN WPs
WP will set-up environmental surveillance programs for major infectious diseases agents occurring in sewage and non-sewage environments containing or contaminated with human excreta in sub-Saharan countries. The development and testing of the environmental surveillance programs will take place in representative pre-selected study locations in Tanzania, DR Congo and Burkina Faso. They will set up environmental surveillance systems for multiple human pathogens to serve as an early warning tool and as a novel surveillance strategy to identify known and unknown infectious pathogens, (re)emerging infections and antimicrobial resistance. The surveillance system can also act as a tool to track infectious diseases at population level in a cost-effective manner.