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

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.