Unsheltered homeless individuals represent a highly vulnerable population, particularly when it comes to infectious and chronic disease. This is obviously due to the lack of shelter but also because of challenges in seeking and receiving adequate healthcare services. Also, unsheltered individuals are often missed when it comes to traditional public health surveillance. Wastewater surveillance has been shown to be an effective tool for assessing public health conditions in a community, including when there’s insufficient clinical testing. So can environmental surveillance fill a similar gap when it comes to unsheltered individuals?

This episode takes a "deep dive" into the use of environmental surveillance—or sampling from untreated environmental waters—to assess public health conditions among unsheltered homeless individuals. A previous podcast focused on the water quality “fingerprint” of unsheltered homelessness, but this one explains what that “fingerprint” tells us about the level of COVID-19 in that community.

This is an AI-generated podcast created with NotebookLM based on a publication in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The original article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00938