We wanted to create an online learning platform to support the European efforts in implementing WBE. OneHealthWatch aimed at developing a practical training programme for harmonized and standardized wastewater surveillance, to enable contamination detection at national scale in the different European Member States. The training modules aimed at understanding the general purpose of WBE, learning the sampling and analysis methods of wastewater or knowing the ethical aspects at stake with WBE. Our goal was to unify the knowledge about WBE among diverse concerned populations: workers in wastewater management, health professionals dealing with pandemic management as well as general public in order to allow a social acceptance of the methodology. Harmonization of the methods and approaches are thought to facilitate data and results exchanges between wastewater and health sectors at regional/national scale. Finally, the multilingual approach, with largely spoken language as English, Spanish, French and German, was though to allow dissemination of the platform on other parts of the world as Latin America and North America, “Francophonie”, especially in Africa.
Rapidly after the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemics in 2020, there has been increasing evidence that the monitoring of viruses in wastewater was able to inform valuably on the contamination dynamics at the population level. The so-called wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) approach was indeed not new; it had been used from the 1950’s to the monitoring the regression of poliovirus following vaccination. In 2021, the need for establishing performant WBE for SARS-CoV-2 in European countries became obvious. JRC (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) pointed that the availability of learning on WBE, not only targeting viruses but also health-related chemical pollutants, was key for epidemic preparedness and management. The pressing need was to connect the different actors of the chain of actions from the wastewater sampling until the use of the resulting information for political decision-making. More precisely, it was needed that each actors understand the technical and ethical constraints of each step of the process. Another need was to ensure a broad social acceptance of WBE by the citizens. Allowing easy translation of the learning material into different languages was one of the needs identified at the European level.