The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has pledged to embed wastewater and environmental surveillance into its national disease control framework, following a two-day international conference in Accra that brought together health experts, scientists and policymakers from 31 countries to advance the use of sewage data as an early-warning tool for infectious disease.
The Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance (WES) Conference 2026, organised by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and the GHS under the theme “Harnessing Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance: A One Health and Disease Control Tool,” drew 178 in-person participants and more than 400 virtual attendees daily from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas.
GHS Director-General Dr. Samuel Kaba Akoriyea said Ghana had already applied environmental surveillance in its polio eradication efforts and was now exploring broader use across other infectious disease threats. He emphasised that the approach must be treated as a long-term national investment rather than a short-term project, calling for adequate funding, infrastructure and skilled personnel. “We must leverage innovation, advances in genomics, data science, and artificial intelligence, and ensure that the data generated translates into action,” he said.
Kate Medlicott, Technical Lead on Sanitation and Wastewater at the World Health Organization (WHO), said wastewater surveillance provided critical trend data particularly in countries where clinical reporting systems were incomplete, and that integrating it into national health strategies could meaningfully reduce the economic burden of disease outbreaks through earlier detection.
Participants identified heavy reliance on donor funding as a major vulnerability for WES programmes in low- and middle-income countries, warning that sustainability could not be assured without domestic financing, supportive policy frameworks and stronger laboratory infrastructure.
Closing the conference, Prof. Ellis Owusu-Dabo, immediate past Pro Vice-Chancellor of KNUST and chairperson of the organising committee, called for scalable and resilient systems to advance both national and global health security. “These are not just theoretical contributions, but evidence of lives that can be saved when we listen to what our water is telling us,” he said.
Key recommendations from the conference included embedding WES within the One Health framework, which connects human, animal and environmental health, strengthening research to guide policy decisions and developing sustainable financing models. Partner institutions acknowledged included the University of Ghana, the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, the Environmental Protection Authority, Scripps Research, the Ministry of Health and the Gates Foundation.
