The UK Health Security Agency announced on 23 September 2026 that its wastewater and environmental surveillance programme is expanding into an England-wide system called PRISM (Pathogen Risk Intelligence through Surveillance and Modelling). According to the agency, £3 million from the UK Integrated Security Fund would, over two years, let UKHSA laboratories extend surveillance to targeted hospital wastewater sites and high-footfall locations including transport hubs. PRISM builds on a development programme UKHSA launched in April 2025.

UKHSA said the programme is designed to be pathogen-agnostic, with the potential to detect known threats, novel variations and previously undetected pathogens from a single sample. The agency said the approach could support public health surveillance, biosecurity and antimicrobial resistance monitoring at once, and that development work had tracked norovirus in wastewater, distinguishing circulating strains with AI tools. UKHSA also said it aims to monitor drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, including hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae and Candidozyma auris.

Professor Robin May, UKHSA Chief Scientific Officer, said the diversity of biological threats is growing and described PRISM as setting foundations for an early warning system. The agency noted that viruses such as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have not emerged in the UK.