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The rapidly expanding use of wastewater for public health surveillance requires new strategies to protect privacy rights, while data are collected at increasingly discrete geospatial scales, i.e., city, neighborhood, campus, and building-level. Data collected at high geospatial resolution can inform on labile, short-lived biomarkers, thereby making wastewater-derived data both more actionable and more likely to cause privacy concerns and stigma- tization of subpopulations. Additionally, data sharing restrictions among neighboring cities and communities can complicate efforts to balance public health protections with citizens’ privacy. Here, we have created an encrypted framework that facilitates the sharing of sensitive population health data among entities that lack trust for one another (e.g., between adjacent municipalities with different governance of health monitoring and data sharing). We demonstrate the utility of this approach with two real-world cases. Our results show the feasibility of sharing encrypted data between two municipalities and a laboratory, while performing secure private com- putations for wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) with high precision, fast speeds, and low data costs. This framework is amenable to other computations used by WBE researchers including population normalized mass loads, fecal indicator normalizations, and quality control measures. The Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention’s National Wastewater Surveillance System shows ~8 % of the records attributed to collection before the wastewater treatment plant, illustrating an opportunity to further expand currently limited community-level sampling and public health surveillance through security and responsible data-sharing as outlined here. 

We describe the complete capsid of a genotype C1-like Enterovirus A71 variant recovered from wastewater in a neighborhood in the greater Tempe, Arizona area (Southwest United States) in May 2020 using a pan-enterovirus amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing strategy. The variant seems to have been circulating for over two years, but its sequence has not been documented in that period. As the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has resulted in changes in health-seeking behavior and overwhelmed pathogen diagnostics, our findings highlight the importance of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE ) as an early warning system for virus surveillance.