Monitoring disease trends and characterization of non-typhoidal Salmonella isolates from community wastewater in a mid-sized city in Florida, USA: a retrospective study.

Wastewater-based epidemiology can serve as a leading indicator of community salmonellosis hospitalizations, with wastewater trends predicting hospital admissions by 1 week.

• Why it matters: Traditional clinical surveillance underestimates the true burden of non-typhoidal Salmonella infections, creating a need for alternative monitoring methods to improve public health responses.
• What they did: A retrospective study analyzed 106 weekly wastewater samples from September 2020 to September 2021, detecting NTS in 76.42% of samples and recovering 27 isolates representing 11 serotypes, including some not identified through clinical surveillance.
• The result: Wastewater isolates showed potential for multi-drug resistance and contained virulence genes, and viable NTS persisted in frozen samples for over 1 year, demonstrating wastewater-based epidemiology’s value for retrospective and real-time disease monitoring.