UKHSA expands wastewater surveillance to strengthen ‘early warning system’ for dangerous pathogens

Pathfinder · 2026-09-23T13:59:25-0400

UKHSA expands wastewater surveillance to strengthen ‘early warning system’ for dangerous pathogens

£3 million from the UK Integrated Security Fund (ISF) will enable UKHSA labs to extend surveillance to hospital wastewater sites and high-footfall locations.

From: UK Health Security Agency
Published:23 September 2026

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has announced today that their wastewater and environmental surveillance programme is expanding to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect pathogens with significant public health threat.

The new programme, called PRISM (Pathogen Risk Intelligence through Surveillance and Modelling), builds on the development programme for wastewater monitoring launched by UKHSA in April 2025. The development programme tested new technologies that are able to detect dangerous viruses in wastewater. It generated valuable data and insights, demonstrating the potential of environmental surveillance to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect and monitor emerging health threats. Building on these advances, PRISM is expanding into an England-wide system, strengthening existing surveillance and the country’s ability to detect outbreaks.

Over the next 2 years, a £3 million investment from the UK Integrated Security Fund (ISF) will enable UKHSA laboratories to scale up this work, extending surveillance to targeted hospital wastewater sites and high-footfall locations including transport hubs.

PRISM has been designed to be pathogen-agnostic, meaning it has the potential to detect known threats, novel variations of known threats as well as previously undetected pathogens, all from a single sample.

Unlike existing targeted approaches, such as the UK’s longstanding wastewater surveillance system for polio, PRISM’s ‘sample once, test many’ approach means the same environmental sample can support public health surveillance, biosecurity, and antimicrobial resistance monitoring simultaneously, providing significantly greater value from England’s surveillance investment.

Although viruses such as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have not emerged in the UK, this new detection technology has the potential to identify these and other dangerous pathogens at an early stage, strengthening the UK’s biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.

PRISM will also track seasonal illnesses that place significant pressure on the NHS each winter. During early development, PRISM’s surveillance successfully tracked norovirus, the winter vomiting bug, in wastewater, including, distinguishing between different strains circulating across the country, with the support of AI tools.

The programme is also working towards strengthening the UK’s response to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), one of the most significant long-term threats to public health. By conducting different tests on the same environmental sample, UKHSA scientists will be able to monitor drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, including hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae and Candidozyma auris, helping build a clearer country-wide picture of where and how resistance is spreading.

Professor Robin May, Chief Scientific Officer at UKHSA said:

The diversity of biological threats we face is growing and we need to continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of that curve. PRISM is a great step in that direction, setting the foundations for a powerful early warning system that will help us respond swiftly in order to protect the public before problems reach our hospitals and communities.

A year ago, we set out to explore whether new technologies could improve how we detect dangerous pathogens in wastewater and strengthen our preparedness for future pandemics. Now, with the launch of PRISM, we are expanding this capability into an England-wide system and establishing one of the largest environmental surveillance programmes at UKHSA.

Though viruses such as Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever and Ebola are, happily, absent from the UK, this new surveillance means we would be better equipped to spot them early, should they ever arrive in this country. In addition, this powerful surveillance system is already being used to track more common pathogens such as norovirus , giving us a clearer picture of the behaviour of important pathogens that cause pressures for the NHS every winter.

The UKHSA wastewater monitoring project for pathogen detection is one of several biosecurity projects funded through the UK Integrated Security Fund (UKISF) Biosecurity Portfolio, launched by Cabinet Office earlier this year.