The Modjadji Initiative is an international wastewater-based pathogen surveillance consortium comprised of researchers at Scripps Research in the United States, the National Institute for Communicable Disease (NICD) in South Africa, and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
During many infections, individuals shed pathogen genetic material via their stool and urine. At sites where wastewater from the population aggregates and mixes, like wastewater treatment plants, researchers can obtain representative samples of community pathogen prevalence and evolution. In contrast with clinical sampling approaches, wastewater genomic surveillance tends to be far more cost-effective and minimizes sampling biases.
