Highlights from Lungfish’s presentation to the National Board of Public Health Examiners’ Webinar Wednesday series
As traditional public health surveillance systems come under increasing strain, environmental surveillance is emerging as a vital source of timely disease intelligence. Because it draws on signals from entire communities rather than the subset of people who seek care and get tested, environmental surveillance can offer a more representative picture of pathogen circulation, often well before clinical systems register a change.
On July 8, 2026, Heidi Horn, Tara Ornstein, and Sasha Tretyakova presented Lungfish’s work as part of the National Board of Public Health Examiners’ Webinar Wednesday series. The team explained how wastewater and air monitoring, paired with metagenomic sequencing, can identify circulating pathogens days or weeks before cases surface through clinical channels.
Tara Ornstein walked through the publicly available wastewater surveillance dashboards, describing what each one offers and how public health practitioners can use them to strengthen their programs. Heidi Horn provided an overview of air sampling and described Lungfish’s work detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the air in Nepal. Sasha Tretyakova presented Lungfish’s work in Wisconsin schools, illustrating how data from air sampling can complement other surveillance efforts.
The well-attended session closed with a robust discussion of the practical realities of implementing environmental surveillance and its potential role in outbreak response. Participants were especially interested in the use of wastewater surveillance for measles. The Lungfish team noted that researchers affiliated with Lungfish have published important new work on detecting measles in wastewater, underscoring how the approach can help identify measles activity and complement traditional public health reporting.
A recording of the webinar is available here. To learn more about Lungfish’s environmental surveillance work, visit lung.fish.