Ethical Considerations for Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance in Jails and Prisons
Alysse Wurcel, an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Section of General Internal Medicine, and Meera Kariyil, a medical student at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, are co-authors on a recent publication titled “Ethical Considerations for Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance in Carceral Settings: Building a Framework to Guide Public Health Interventions.” This paper is the first in a collaboration between Dr. Wurcel and Dr. Muhammad Zaman from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. Co-authors include other members from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and colleagues from the Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
In this analytic essay, the authors “trace the evolution of wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) in carceral settings and analyze the ethical, medical, and legal challenges.” They note that WES has historically been implemented in carceral settings to detect illicit drug use, and, as it expanded to SARS-CoV-2 in communities, “interest grew in its use in carceral settings where mortality rates were up to 3 times higher than in the general population.” Despite attempts to operationalize it, “WES adoption for infectious disease surveillance in US carceral settings remains limited and fragmented.”
The authors add that WES “provides a unique opportunity to address the chronic health challenges affecting incarcerated populations, a group made especially vulnerable by structural marginalization.” They conclude that “realizing WES’s potential requires robust frameworks grounded in participatory governance, strong data protection, and clear limits on downstream data use,” and “a commitment to ethical practices must remain at the center of all public health research in all settings.”