Encrypted data-sharing for preserving privacy in wastewater-based epidemiology.

Autor: Driver EM; Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA., Ahsan M; Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA., Piske L; Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA., Lee H; Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA., Forrest S; Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA., Halden RU; Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. Electronic address: rolf.halden@asu.edu., Trieu N; Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. Electronic address: nitrieu@asu.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: The Science of the total environment [Sci Total Environ] 2024 Aug 25; Vol. 940, pp. 173315. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 May 17.
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.173315
Abstrakt: 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 stigmatization 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 computations 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 Prevention'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.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.
(Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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