WBE Webinar | Tuesday April 5, 2022

The future of Wastewater Surveillance to Protect Public Health 

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What we can learn from international approaches to public health monitoring

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 10:00-11:30 am EST – 16:00-17:30 CEST

Webinar location: ZOOM

Learn more about the future wastewater surveillance to protect public health.

Agenda

Moderator:  Dr. Itai Bar-Or – Director | Israel National Centre for Environmental Virology

1. Israeli Ministry of Health about the future of public health in the collection system
   Moshe  Wein -WBE Surveillance Project Lead | Israeli Ministry of Health
   1. Tracking antimicrobial resistance using a One Health-based approach
      Prof. Ariel Kushmaro – Department of Biotechnology Engineering | BGU
   2. Managing an evolving pandemics using virome abundance and diversity 
      Prof. Jacob Moran-Gilad, Director School of Public Health | BGU
      Ido Blank – VP Special Projects | Kando
      
2. Lessons learned and the future outlook of public health surveillance. 
   Jordan Schmidt – Director, Product Applications | LuminUltra Technologies Ltd
3. From pandemic disaster to pandemic preparedness: Valuable insights from two continents In this session we’ll share the lessons learned while integrating and comparing clinical and wastewater surveillance data from the Netherlands and South Africa into our dashboard.
   Kerusha Lutchmiah – Consultant & Project Manager – Water Technology International | Royal Haskoning DHV
   
   A dashboard is only as good as the data it receives, so developing a standardized data protocol was imperative to overcoming the challenges in the two very different countries.
   These challenges include:
   – Lack of funds & lack of ownership
   – Testing not being accessible to everyone
   – Large gaps in data, unexplained peaks and differences in normalization
   – Differences in methodologies and monitoring regimes
   – Privacy regulations
   – Politics, including country bans and their consequence on research

Regardless of the challenges, a comparison of the data was still possible, resulting in valuable outcomes. This showed that a beneficial pandemic monitoring program can be developed with urgency, to predict future measures and prevent further surges.