17d9ca0e37
RKI AMELAG wastewater surveillance data with CSV exports and bun fetch script. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
126 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
126 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
# AMELAG — Abwassersurveillance (RKI + Umweltbundesamt)
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**Source ID:** DS-00018
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**Record Created:** 2026-04-22
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**Last Updated:** 2026-04-22
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**Cataloger:** Sven / PAI
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**Review Status:** Initial
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---
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## Bibliographic Information
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### Title Statement
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- **Main Title:** Abwassersurveillance für die epidemiologische Lagebewertung (AMELAG)
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- **Abbreviated Title:** AMELAG Wastewater
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- **URL:** https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG
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### Responsibility Statement
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- **Publisher/Issuing Body:** Robert Koch-Institut (RKI) jointly with Umweltbundesamt (UBA)
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- **Legal Basis:** Infektionsschutzgesetz (IfSG), Gesundheitsdatennutzungsgesetz
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- **Contact:** https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Institut/OrgEinheiten/MFI/MFI4/mfi4_node.html
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### Publication Information
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- **Date of First Publication:** 2022 (SARS-CoV-2 monitoring since February 2022)
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- **Publication Frequency:** Weekly (Thursday–Wednesday sampling, Wednesday reporting)
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- **Current Status:** Active
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- **License:** CC-BY 4.0 International
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---
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## Content Description
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### What it contains
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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.
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**Pathogens monitored:**
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- SARS-CoV-2
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- Influenza A, Influenza B (and combined A+B)
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- RSV A, RSV B (and combined A+B, A/B)
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**Data products:**
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- **amelag_aggregierte_kurve.tsv** — Population-weighted national aggregate time series (weekly)
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- **amelag_einzelstandorte.tsv** — Individual treatment plant data (daily)
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**Key fields:**
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- `viruslast` — Viral load in gene copies per liter (gc/L)
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- `viruslast_normalisiert` — Flow-normalized viral load
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- `vorhersage` — GAM-smoothed prediction
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- `obere_schranke` / `untere_schranke` — 95% confidence intervals
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- `n` — Number of reporting sites
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- `anteil_bev` — Population coverage fraction
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### Coverage
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- Geographic: Germany (national aggregate + individual sites by Bundesland)
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- Temporal: SARS-CoV-2 since February 2022; Influenza/RSV since late 2023
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- Sites: ~67–75 wastewater treatment plants (varies by week)
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- Population coverage: ~25% of German population
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- Data lag: typically 1–2 weeks from sampling to publication
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---
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## Substrate Relevance
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### Problems Addressed
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- **PR-00003 (Performance Society Exhaustion):** Pandemic waves directly impact worker health, sick days, and productivity. Wastewater provides leading indicator of burden.
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- **Public Health Monitoring:** Unbiased population-level infection signal — captures asymptomatic/untested infections that clinical surveillance misses.
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### Connection to DE-Plan
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- **Gesundheitsschutz:** Real-time pandemic monitoring capacity — a permanent infrastructure investment post-COVID.
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- **Resilienz:** Early warning system for respiratory pathogen waves.
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### Dataset: DE-Wastewater-Surveillance ✅
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Dataset implemented at `Data/DE-Wastewater-Surveillance/README.md`.
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**As of 2026-04-22 (latest data 2026-04-15):**
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| Metric | Value |
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|--------|-------|
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| SARS-CoV-2 | 1,554 gc/L (↓↓ -52.8% 4w) |
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| Influenza A | 1,354 gc/L (↓↓ -39.3% 4w) |
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| Influenza B | 1,612 gc/L (→ -3.3% 4w) |
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| RSV A | 3,895 gc/L (↓↓ -44.5% 4w) |
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| RSV B | 6,708 gc/L (↓↓ -27.0% 4w) |
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---
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## API / Access
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- **Data repository:** https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG
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- **Raw data URLs:**
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- Aggregate: `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG/main/amelag_aggregierte_kurve.tsv`
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- Individual sites: `https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robert-koch-institut/Abwassersurveillance_AMELAG/main/amelag_einzelstandorte.tsv`
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- **Dashboard:** https://infektionsradar.rki.de/de/covid/abwasser (no public API)
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- **UBA portal:** https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/amelag
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- **Substrate fetch script:** `bun get-de-wastewater` — writes to `Data/DE-Wastewater-Surveillance/`
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- **Auth:** None required
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- **Rate limit:** GitHub raw content CDN; no practical limit for weekly fetches
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- **Format:** Tab-separated values (TSV), UTF-8, ISO 8601 dates
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- **Last fetched:** 2026-04-22 — 905 data points, 8 pathogen types
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---
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## Quality Assessment
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| Dimension | Rating | Notes |
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|-----------|--------|-------|
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| **Completeness** | High | ~25% population coverage; not all regions equally represented |
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| **Accuracy** | Very High | PCR-based quantification with quality controls; GAM smoothing reduces noise |
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| **Timeliness** | High | Weekly updates, 1–2 week lag |
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| **Comparability** | Medium | Methodology standardized within AMELAG; cross-country comparison requires normalization |
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| **Access** | Very High | Open data on GitHub, CC-BY 4.0, machine-readable TSV |
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**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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---
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## Connections to Other Sources
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| Source | Relationship |
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|--------|-------------|
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| DE-Wastewater-Surveillance (README.md) | Primary dataset derived from this source |
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| Bay-Area-COVID-Wastewater | US equivalent for cross-country comparison |
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| DE-Mental-Health | Pandemic impact on mental health indicators |
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| DS-00005—CDC_WONDER_Mortality | US mortality context for pandemic comparison |
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