ArticleEnvironmental science and pollution research international2026
Exploring community-level gut health amidst COVID-19 pandemic: a proposed application of longitudinal wastewater surveillance.
Article in Environmental science and pollution research international, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) offers a unique, scalable method to monitor disease burden at a community level by capturing all individuals within a sewershed. While emerging evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 may influence the human gut microbiota, which is essential for health and disease outcomes, most microbiome studies remain limited to the individual scale. Given wastewater's sensitivity to fluctuations in human fecal composition, we propose leveraging WBE as a cost-effective tool to characterize longitudinal microbial shifts in community-level gut microbiota throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In this exploratory study, we analyze wastewater from two central Ohio, USA, cities, Columbus and Newark, which differ in socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Monthly influent samples (n = 69) were collected from August 2020 through June 2022. Clinical COVID-19 cases were collected from within each sewershed, and SARS-CoV-2 gene concentrations were quantified from wastewater samples. 16S rRNA gene sequencing was conducted to characterize human-gut-associated bacterial communities. We report that wastewater influent exhibits distinct genus-level bacterial signatures reflective of each catchment population. Significant temporal changes in bacterial structure and diversity were observed across both cities, indicating community gut health shifts throughout the pandemic. Several taxa, including but not limited to Collinsella, Megasphaera, and Actinobacteriota, showed notable relative abundance fluctuations that may be linked to infection and warrant further investigation as potential microbial biomarkers. This study demonstrates that urban population-level gut microbiome patterns can be robustly characterized through wastewater influent. Most notably, this 23-month study represents the first effort to examine community gut microbiota structural changes across two cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlight sewage as a population-level proxy for public health status and disease burden while offering a novel framework for integrating microbiome science into WBE. This study underscores the potential of wastewater surveillance to advance global infectious disease preparedness and population-scale microbiome research.
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