UK Integrated Security Fund (ISF) has awarded £3 million to enable the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) UKHSA labs to extend surveillance to hospital wastewater sites and high-footfall locations.
UKHSA's wastewater and environmental surveillance programme will expand 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, which tested new technologies that are able to detect dangerous viruses in wastewater.
The results from the development programme produced data and insights which showed the potential of environmental surveillance to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect and monitor emerging health threats.
PRISM will expand this into an England-wide system, strengthening existing surveillance and the country’s ability to detect outbreaks.
Over a period of two years, a £3 million investment from ISF will enable UKHSA laboratories to scale up this work, extending surveillance to targeted hospital wastewater sites and high-footfall locations including transport hubs.
The programme is 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.
Different from other 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.
Professor Robin May, Chief Scientific Officer at UKHSA said: "The diversity of biological threats we face is growing and we need to continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of that curve. PRISM is a great step in that direction, setting the foundations for a powerful early warning system that will help us respond swiftly in order to protect the public before problems reach our hospitals and communities.
"A year ago, we set out to explore whether new technologies could improve how we detect dangerous pathogens in wastewater and strengthen our preparedness for future pandemics. Now, with the launch of PRISM, we are expanding this capability into an England-wide system and establishing one of the largest environmental surveillance programmes at UKHSA.
"Though viruses such as Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever and Ebola are, happily, absent from the UK, this new surveillance means we would be better equipped to spot them early, should they ever arrive in this country. In addition, this powerful surveillance system is already being used to track more common pathogens such as norovirus , giving us a clearer picture of the behaviour of important pathogens that cause pressures for the NHS every winter."
