The World Cup GOAL... is to fight Disease

Epidemiologists will be busy this summer sifting through sewage and social media with the goal of keeping soccer fans and the public safe from severe illness during the World Cup, one of the largest and most globally diverse mass gatherings ever anticipated.

A public health squad based in Washington, D.C., plans to monitor wastewater and internet chatter to detect and track infectious diseases should they emerge in any of the U.S. or Canadian cities hosting World Cup players, their matches, and millions of spectators, organizers said.

Planning the public health response for an event of this scale is intensive and involves a lot of coordination, Rebecca Katz PhD, MPH, professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, told CIDRAP News. Seeing it in action will show how well some US public health measures work. 

“It’s also a test of some of the surveillance tools that we rolled out during the pandemic but we can use at scale during the World Cup,” she said. “I’m thinking specifically around things like wastewater surveillance… It’s a way to see just how powerful that surveillance tool is.” 

Public health professionals in Doha, Qatar, used wastewater surveillance during the 2022 World Cup to track infectious diseases, which allowed them to pinpoint the location of COVID-19 and enteroviruses and intervene early, according to a 2024 study published in Heliyon. 

Katz is heading the Health Security Operations Center at Georgetown, a partnership with MedStar Health. The center will analyze wastewater surveillance data as part of its overall monitoring and communication efforts during the games, issuing a daily situation report.  

“The idea behind this is to be an intelligence fusion center for disease surveillance information and to be able to share that information directly back out with local, state, and federal health authorities,” she said. 

According to the team, budget and staffing cuts under the Trump administration, along with the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization, have exacerbated challenges they face now. 

Experts say the scale of the event and the globe-spanning travel involved pose a heightened risk of rapid disease transmission at a time when strained U.S. public health resources are coping at home and abroad with outbreaks of measles, Ebola and hantavirus.