Abstract

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has emerged as a powerful tool for public health surveillance, enabling researchers to monitor patterns of drug use, lifestyle behaviors, and disease prevalence by analyzing biomarkers excreted by human populations into wastewater. Yet, a critical question has remained largely unexplored: to what extent do these biomarkers adhere to suspended particulate matter (SPM) within wastewater, potentially causing underestimations when only the liquid fraction is analyzed?