Troja Fulvia, Indio Valentina, Savini Federica, Seguino Alessandro, Serraino Andrea, Fuschi Alessandro, Remondini Daniel, De Cesare Alessandra
Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences, University of Bologna, Ozzano dell'Emilia.
Department of Astronomy and Physics, University of Bologna, Italy.
Ital J Food Saf. 2024 Oct 10;13(4):12725. doi: 10.4081/ijfs.2024.12725. eCollection 2024 Nov 12.
In 2022, the number of foodborne outbreaks in Europe increased by 43.9%, highlighting the need to improve surveillance systems and design outbreak predictive tools. This review aims to assess the scientific literature describing wastewater surveillance to monitor foodborne pathogens in association with clinical data. In the selected studies, the relationship between peaks of pathogen concentration in wastewater and reported clinical cases is described. Moreover, details on analytical methods to detect and quantify pathogens as well as wastewater sampling procedures are discussed. Few papers show a statistically significant correlation between high concentrations of foodborne pathogens in wastewater and the occurrence of clinical cases. However, monitoring pathogen concentration in wastewater looks like a promising and cost-effective strategy to improve foodborne outbreak surveillance. Such a strategy can be articulated in three steps, where the first one is testing wastewater with an untargeted method, like shotgun metagenomic, to detect microorganisms belonging to different domains. The second consists of testing wastewater with a targeted method, such as quantitative polymerase chain reaction, to quantify those specific pathogens that in the metagenomic dataset display an increasing trend or exceed baseline concentration thresholds. The third involves the integrated wastewater and clinical data analysis and modeling to find meaningful epidemiological correlations and make predictions.
2022年，欧洲食源性疾病暴发数量增加了43.9%，这凸显了改进监测系统和设计暴发预测工具的必要性。本综述旨在评估描述废水监测以结合临床数据监测食源性病原体的科学文献。在所选研究中，描述了废水中病原体浓度峰值与报告的临床病例之间的关系。此外，还讨论了检测和量化病原体的分析方法以及废水采样程序的细节。很少有论文表明废水中高浓度的食源性病原体与临床病例的发生之间存在统计学上的显著相关性。然而，监测废水中的病原体浓度似乎是一种有前景且具有成本效益的策略，可用于改进食源性疾病暴发监测。这样的策略可以分为三个步骤，第一步是使用非靶向方法（如鸟枪法宏基因组学）检测废水，以检测属于不同领域的微生物。第二步是使用靶向方法（如定量聚合酶链反应）检测废水，以量化那些在宏基因组数据集中显示出上升趋势或超过基线浓度阈值的特定病原体。第三步涉及综合废水和临床数据分析及建模，以找到有意义的流行病学相关性并进行预测。
