A Scoping Review on the Ethics of Wastewater Surveillance for COVID-19

Wastewater surveillance (WWS) emerged as a tool to monitor public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wastewater surveillance is generally undertaken voluntarily by public health and wastewater treatment agencies. Therefore, public trust and support is essential to its sustainability. Development and implementation of ethically informed practices may contribute to public support for expansion of WWS to other public health applications.

We conducted a scoping review of existing publications on the ethics of WWS for COVID-19. We characterized these publications and identified research gaps.

This scoping review was based on searches through Scopus and PubMed for the period January 2020 to December 2023 focusing on four concepts: wastewater, surveillance, ethics, and COVID-19. We included studies published in journals, reports, and books and identified 31 publications. Publications were coded thematically as well as by approach, region, discipline, and publication type.

The majority of publications focused on the need to develop ethical guidelines that promote long-term public support for WWS. A number of publications proposed ethical guidelines and also emphasized that these considerations are context-specific and dynamic, requiring an ongoing system for input as new situations, endpoints, and technologies evolve. Themes included protection of privacy, potential to stigmatize communities with high COVID-19 signals, the importance of effective communication, equitable application of WWS, community engagement, and high standards for data quality. There were few empirical studies of diverse populations' preferences for WWS. Ethical considerations may vary across communities and countries and as new applications of wastewater surveillance emerge.

We provide an overview of the emerging principles for ethical practice of WWS and identify gaps in knowledge. These findings may guide future research and consideration of ethics as decisionmakers consider new monitoring endpoints (eg, pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs, infectious diseases, and indicators of population health).