Underdetection of microbial infectious disease outbreaks in human communities carries enormous health costs and is an ongoing problem in public health monitoring (which relies almost exclusively on data from health clinics). Surveillance of municipal wastewater for community-level monitoring of infectious disease burdens has the potential to fill this information gap, due to its easy access to the mixed community microbiome. In the present study, the genomes of 21 S . Java isolates (collected from municipal wastewater in Honolulu) were analyzed; results showed that the same Salmonella strain that caused a known salmonellosis clinical outbreak in spring 2010 remerged as the most dominant strain in municipal wastewater in spring 2011, indicating a new outbreak that was not detected by health clinics. Our results show that wastewater monitoring holds great promise to inform the field of public health regarding outbreak status within communities.
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Diemert et al. (2019) studied this question.
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