A new Gates Foundation Collection in PLOS on Wastewater & Environmental Surveillance in Low-Resource Settings

We’re excited to announce the publication of a new Collection across several PLOS journals in partnership with the Gates Foundation, including a range of interdisciplinary research on the topic of Wastewater & Environmental Surveillance in Low-Resource Settings.

The Collection, led by Supriya Kumar (Gates Foundation, USA) and Kerrigan McCarthy (National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa), features several articles covering topical areas such as methods and tools for wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) of pathogens, modeling and frameworks for WES, implementation of WES across low-middle- income countries and low-resource settings, as well as standards for WES data collection and sharing.

See below for the full list of published articles featured in this collection, across PLOS Global Public Health, PLOS Water, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLOS Computational Biology, and PLOS One.

Wastewater & Environmental Surveillance in Low-Resource Settings Collection

Kanyerezi S, Guerfali FZ, Anzaku AA, Babaleye OA, Calvert-Joshua T, Nguinkal JA, et al. (2024) Wastewater metagenomics in Africa: Opportunities and challenges. PLOS Glob Public Health 4(12): e0004044. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004044

Badizadegan K, Thompson KM (2025) Characterization of environmental and clinical surveillance inputs to support prospective integrated modeling of the polio endgame. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(2): e0004168. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004168

Mvundura M, Ngwira LG, Shrestha KB, Tuladhar R, Gauld J, Kerr C, et al. (2025) Cost-effectiveness of wastewater-based environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Blantyre, Malawi and Kathmandu, Nepal: A model-based study. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(4): e0004439. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004439

Msomi NS, Levy JI, Matteson NL, Ndlovu N, Ntuli P, Baer A, et al. (2025) Wastewater-integrated pathogen surveillance dashboards enable real-time, transparent, and interpretable public health risk assessment and dissemination. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(5): e0004443. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004443

Daroch N, Kannan SK, Srikantaiah V, Mishra R, Ishtiaq F (2025) Respiratory virus infection dynamics and genomic surveillance to detect seasonal influenza subtypes in wastewater: A longitudinal study in Bengaluru, India. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(9): e0004640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004640

Athreya S, Ishtiaq F, Khandelwal T, Pattabiraman C, Rao L, Sundaresan R, et al. (2026) Localized wastewater surveillance showed correlation but no early warning during Bengaluru’s Omicron wave. PLOS Glob Public Health 6(4): e0004684. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004684

Siko JEE, Dahmer KJ, Manoharan ZZ, Muthukumar A, Amato HK, LeBoa C, et al. (2025) Environmental surveillance of soil-transmitted helminths and other enteric pathogens in settings without networked wastewater infrastructure. PLOS Water 4(1): e0000337. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000337

Yapi EAM, Mossoun AM, Zan-Bi TT, Dindé AO, Gossé LG, Vakou SN, et al. (2025) Expanding access to wastewater surveillance beyond sewered networks: Effectiveness of active and passive sampling of waste effluent streams in Côte d’Ivoire. PLOS Water 4(6): e0000290. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000290

Manuel M, Amato HK, Pilotte N, Chieng B, Araka SB, Siko JEE, et al. (2024) Soil surveillance for monitoring soil-transmitted helminths: Method development and field testing in three countries. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 18(9): e0012416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0012416

Uzzell CB, Gray E, Rigby J, Troman CM, Diness Y, Mkwanda C, et al. (2024) Environmental surveillance for Salmonella Typhi in rivers and wastewater from an informal sewage network in Blantyre, Malawi. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 18(9): e0012518. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0012518

Abraham D, Kathiresan L, Sasikumar M, Aiemjoy K, Charles RC, Kumar D, et al. (2025) Wastewater surveillance for Salmonella Typhi and its association with seroincidence of enteric fever in Vellore, India. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 19(3): e0012373. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0012373

Troman C, Horsfield ST, Abraham D, Mohan VR, Giri S, Nair S, et al. (2025) Determining genotype and antimicrobial resistance of Salmonella Typhi in environmental samples by amplicon sequencing. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 19(7): e0013211. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0013211

Rigby J, Wilson CN, Zuza A, Diness Y, Mkwanda C, Tonthola K, et al. (2025) Diversity of Salmonella enterica isolates from urban river and sewage water in Blantyre, Malawi. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 19(9): e0012413. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0012413

Impalli I, Bergland E, Saad-Roy CM, Grenfell BT, Levin SA, Larsson DGJ, et al. (2025) Optimal sampling frequency and site selection for wastewater and environmental surveillance of infectious pathogens: A value of information assessment. PLoS Comput Biol 21(6): e1013190. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013190

Maree G, Els F, Naidoo Y, Naidoo L, Mahamuza P, Macheke M, et al. (2025) Wastewater surveillance overcomes socio-economic limitations of laboratory-based surveillance when monitoring disease transmission: The South African experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. PLoS ONE 20(2): e0311332. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311332

Owusu M, Darko E, Akortia D, Nkrumah G, Twumasi-Ankrah S, Owusu-Ansah M, et al. (2025) Evaluation of Moore and grab sampling method for Salmonella Typhi detection in environmental samples in Ghana. PLoS ONE 20(2): e0318840. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318840