Substrate/Data/sources/DS-00018—DE_RKI_AMELAG_Wastewater/source.md

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