Environmental Health and Protection Commons^™

Addressing The Challenges Of Establishing Quality Wastewater Or Non- Sewered Sanitation-Based Surveillance, Including Laboratory And Epidemiological Considerations, In Malawi, Rochelle H. Holm, Ruth Nyirenda, Ted Smith, Petros Chigwechokha

Faculty Scholarship

Learning from clinical laboratories, wastewater or environmental (including non-sewered sanitation) environmental microbiology laboratories can be established in resource-limited settings that focus on pathogen detection and pandemic prevention. Transparent discussions on the laboratory challenges and adaptations required for this can help meet the future requirements of health research and surveillance. This report aims to describe the challenges encountered when setting up a wastewater or environmental laboratory for multipathogen surveillance in Malawi, a resource-limited setting, as well as the lessons learnt. We identified nine unifying themes: what to monitor, human resource capacity, indicators of data quality, equipment availability, supply of consumable goods, …