# AMELAG — Abwassersurveillance (RKI + Umweltbundesamt)

**Source ID:** DS-00018
**Record Created:** 2026-04-22
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-22
**Cataloger:** Sven / PAI
**Review Status:** Initial

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## Bibliographic Information

### Title Statement
- **Main Title:** Abwassersurveillance für die epidemiologische Lagebewertung (AMELAG)
- **Abbreviated Title:** AMELAG Wastewater
- **URL:** https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG

### Responsibility Statement
- **Publisher/Issuing Body:** Robert Koch-Institut (RKI) jointly with Umweltbundesamt (UBA)
- **Legal Basis:** Infektionsschutzgesetz (IfSG), Gesundheitsdatennutzungsgesetz
- **Contact:** https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Institut/OrgEinheiten/MFI/MFI4/mfi4_node.html

### Publication Information
- **Date of First Publication:** 2022 (SARS-CoV-2 monitoring since February 2022)
- **Publication Frequency:** Weekly (Thursday–Wednesday sampling, Wednesday reporting)
- **Current Status:** Active
- **License:** CC-BY 4.0 International

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## Content Description

### What it contains

AMELAG is Germany's national wastewater surveillance system for respiratory pathogens. Wastewater samples from treatment plants (Kläranlagen) are analyzed for viral RNA to estimate population-level infection dynamics independent of clinical testing.

**Pathogens monitored:**
- SARS-CoV-2
- Influenza A, Influenza B (and combined A+B)
- RSV A, RSV B (and combined A+B, A/B)

**Data products:**
- **amelag_aggregierte_kurve.tsv** — Population-weighted national aggregate time series (weekly)
- **amelag_einzelstandorte.tsv** — Individual treatment plant data (daily)

**Key fields:**
- `viruslast` — Viral load in gene copies per liter (gc/L)
- `viruslast_normalisiert` — Flow-normalized viral load
- `vorhersage` — GAM-smoothed prediction
- `obere_schranke` / `untere_schranke` — 95% confidence intervals
- `n` — Number of reporting sites
- `anteil_bev` — Population coverage fraction

### Coverage
- Geographic: Germany (national aggregate + individual sites by Bundesland)
- Temporal: SARS-CoV-2 since February 2022; Influenza/RSV since late 2023
- Sites: ~67–75 wastewater treatment plants (varies by week)
- Population coverage: ~25% of German population
- Data lag: typically 1–2 weeks from sampling to publication

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## Substrate Relevance

### Problems Addressed
- **PR-00003 (Performance Society Exhaustion):** Pandemic waves directly impact worker health, sick days, and productivity. Wastewater provides leading indicator of burden.
- **Public Health Monitoring:** Unbiased population-level infection signal — captures asymptomatic/untested infections that clinical surveillance misses.

### Connection to DE-Plan
- **Gesundheitsschutz:** Real-time pandemic monitoring capacity — a permanent infrastructure investment post-COVID.
- **Resilienz:** Early warning system for respiratory pathogen waves.

### Dataset: DE-Wastewater-Surveillance ✅

Dataset implemented at `Data/DE-Wastewater-Surveillance/README.md`.

**As of 2026-04-22 (latest data 2026-04-15):**
| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| SARS-CoV-2 | 1,554 gc/L (↓↓ -52.8% 4w) |
| Influenza A | 1,354 gc/L (↓↓ -39.3% 4w) |
| Influenza B | 1,612 gc/L (→ -3.3% 4w) |
| RSV A | 3,895 gc/L (↓↓ -44.5% 4w) |
| RSV B | 6,708 gc/L (↓↓ -27.0% 4w) |

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## API / Access

- **Data repository:** https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG
- **Raw data URLs:**
  - Aggregate: `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG/main/amelag_aggregierte_kurve.tsv`
  - Individual sites: `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG/main/amelag_einzelstandorte.tsv`
- **Dashboard:** https://infektionsradar.rki.de/de/covid/abwasser (no public API)
- **UBA portal:** https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/amelag
- **Substrate fetch script:** `bun get-de-wastewater` — writes to `Data/DE-Wastewater-Surveillance/`
- **Auth:** None required
- **Rate limit:** GitHub raw content CDN; no practical limit for weekly fetches
- **Format:** Tab-separated values (TSV), UTF-8, ISO 8601 dates
- **Last fetched:** 2026-04-22 — 905 data points, 8 pathogen types

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## Quality Assessment

| Dimension | Rating | Notes |
|-----------|--------|-------|
| **Completeness** | High | ~25% population coverage; not all regions equally represented |
| **Accuracy** | Very High | PCR-based quantification with quality controls; GAM smoothing reduces noise |
| **Timeliness** | High | Weekly updates, 1–2 week lag |
| **Comparability** | Medium | Methodology standardized within AMELAG; cross-country comparison requires normalization |
| **Access** | Very High | Open data on GitHub, CC-BY 4.0, machine-readable TSV |

**Key limitation:** Wastewater viral load measures population shedding, not clinical infections or disease severity. The gc/L-to-incidence relationship is non-linear and varies by pathogen, shedding duration, and wastewater infrastructure.

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## Connections to Other Sources

| Source | Relationship |
|--------|-------------|
| DE-Wastewater-Surveillance (README.md) | Primary dataset derived from this source |
| Bay-Area-COVID-Wastewater | US equivalent for cross-country comparison |
| DE-Mental-Health | Pandemic impact on mental health indicators |
| DS-00005—CDC_WONDER_Mortality | US mortality context for pandemic comparison |