Every agency publishes its own piece of water surveillance. HELIX is being built to join them on one map for utilities, labs and public health, with each reading’s source attached.
152 sites that report through WastewaterSCAN, and sites in Guam and the US Virgin Islands, are not shown. Why
One layer is shown today. The others are the build list, each named with the public source it will be drawn from.
Observed Infrastructure Regulation Derived
| State or territory | Sites | Very low | Low | Moderate | High | Very high | Not published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 14 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 0 |
| Alaska | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Arizona | 35 | 4 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 3 | 16 |
| Arkansas | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| California | 57 | 1 | 7 | 12 | 20 | 11 | 6 |
| Colorado | 21 | 4 | 8 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| Connecticut | 12 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Delaware | 9 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| District of Columbia | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Florida | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Georgia | 17 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 0 |
| Hawaii | 8 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Idaho | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Illinois | 83 | 50 | 20 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 8 |
| Indiana | 23 | 16 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| Iowa | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Kansas | 9 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Kentucky | 23 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 3 |
| Maine | 16 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Maryland | 10 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Massachusetts | 6 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Michigan | 25 | 18 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Minnesota | 25 | 18 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Mississippi | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Missouri | 29 | 18 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Montana | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Nebraska | 14 | 11 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nevada | 6 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| New Hampshire | 16 | 8 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| New Jersey | 23 | 10 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| New Mexico | 7 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| New York | 152 | 105 | 21 | 13 | 3 | 8 | 2 |
| North Carolina | 34 | 6 | 14 | 9 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| Ohio | 55 | 50 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Oklahoma | 12 | 8 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Oregon | 35 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 10 | 4 | 0 |
| Pennsylvania | 37 | 23 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Rhode Island | 12 | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| South Carolina | 29 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 2 |
| South Dakota | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Texas | 40 | 6 | 1 | 11 | 10 | 12 | 0 |
| Utah | 31 | 12 | 11 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Vermont | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Virginia | 30 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 0 |
| Washington | 25 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 7 | 0 |
| West Virginia | 27 | 7 | 0 | 14 | 2 | 4 | 0 |
| Wisconsin | 41 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Wyoming | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All | 1,092 | 501 | 184 | 150 | 112 | 90 | 55 |
CDC publishes virus levels in wastewater. EPA keeps the register of over 148,000 public water systems. The Water Quality Portal holds sampling results from more than 400 agencies. Europe’s 22,289 bathing waters are reported somewhere else again. The research sits in journals and the rules sit with each regulator. Sources for each figure are listed below.
None of it is joined up by place. HELIX is being built to put it on one map, place by place, and to keep the source attached to every reading.
A red dot labelled “E. coli” tells you nothing you can act on. Was it measured or modelled? In wastewater or at a beach? Last week or in 2019? By a regulator, a paper or a vendor?
The rule HELIX is built on: no observation is published without its provenance. Where a field is unknown, it says unknown. This is one real sample record from the layer above, laid out the way HELIX records it.
Values are copied from the CDC record. Field grouping and the evidence class are HELIX’s. The map is drawn from CDC’s activity-level dataset (atcp-73re); this record is from its sample dataset (j9g8-acpt).
Every source in HELIX will hang under one of five classes, and you will be able to filter by them. Today one class is on the map: B, from CDC.
Measurements contributed by HELIX nodes, by any validated method, with the method and quality checks on record.
None yet. Opens with the founding members.
Government surveillance programs, regulators and international agencies.
CDC today. PHAC, EPA, EEA and WHO planned.
Peer-reviewed publications and recognized research datasets.
Always linked to the paper
Submissions from utilities, sampling participants and researchers.
Shown with who submitted
Modelled trends, automated classifications and events extracted by AI.
Never merged with A to D
The letter says what kind of source a reading came from. A network measurement does not replace a government one: you see both, each labelled. A finding reported in a paper is a research observation, and is never quietly merged with either.
HELIX starts with water, because that is where the public data already is. It is designed to extend to food, air, hospitals and animal surveillance.
A layered map of pathogen observations, surveillance sites, water systems and treatment plants, intended to cover the world.
Pathogen trends and unusual events, each with its evidence listed: how many sites, which source, what change, what confidence. A signal is not an outbreak declaration.
Utilities, monitoring programs, laboratories and research groups, each with one permanent page and one identifier, so hundreds of datasets can point at the same facility.
Monitoring rules by jurisdiction: pathogen, matrix, frequency, method, threshold, effective date and the primary source.HELIX provides informational summaries; consult the underlying authority for compliance decisions.
The utilities, laboratories and universities that contribute their own data as HELIX nodes.
Follow a pathogen, a region, a watershed or a facility and get a short note when something changes: a new study, a new rule, a new monitoring program.
HELIX does not depend on anyone’s instruments to be useful. It begins with what agencies already publish. For each source it will record the publisher and the coverage, and link every reading back to where it came from, as the CDC layer above already does.
| Source | Publisher | What it covers | Class | In HELIX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National Wastewater Surveillance System | US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | Wastewater data for influenza A, COVID-19, RSV, measles, avian influenza A (H5) and mpox, updated weekly, with download and API access. | B | Shown above |
| Wastewater monitoring dashboard | Public Health Agency of Canada | SARS-CoV-2, influenza A, influenza B and RSV levels by site, city and province, with viral load and trend downloads. | B | Next |
| Safe Drinking Water Information System, via ECHO | US Environmental Protection Agency | The register of over 148,000 US public water systems. The national download is updated quarterly. | B | Planned |
| Water Quality Portal | US Geological Survey and US EPA | Sampling sites and results from USGS, EPA and over 400 state, federal, tribal and local agencies, through web services. | B | Planned |
| Urban waste water treatment reporting | European Environment Agency | Spatial and tabular data on agglomerations, discharge points and treatment plants. | B | Planned |
| State of bathing water | European Environment Agency | 22,289 bathing waters across Europe in 2025, monitored for Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci. | B | Planned |
| GLAAS 2024/2025 | World Health Organization and UN-Water | The state of drinking water, sanitation and hygiene systems in 105 countries and territories. | B | Planned |
| PubMed and Europe PMC | US National Library of Medicine; EMBL-EBI | Published surveillance studies, indexed as research observations and always linked to the paper. | C | Planned |
Descriptions are HELIX’s summaries of each publisher’s own pages, checked on 30 Sep 2026. HELIX is independent of these agencies and is not endorsed by them.
A network only works if you are comfortable in it. So contribution is designed around your control: what is visible, how precisely it is placed and which method produced it. None of this is switched on yet.
A sewershed serving one community should not be pinned to a manhole unless its owner says so.
Public registers already list your plant or system. When its HELIX page exists, you will be able to claim it with a work email, correct what is wrong and say what you monitor and how.
Culture, qPCR, sequencing, or a monitoring program you already run. No particular instrument is required to become a node.
We are looking for the first 1,000 organizations willing to help build the world’s open environmental biosurveillance network.
Utilities, universities, laboratories, government agencies, NGOs and citizen scientists are all welcome.
Tell us your organization, where you are and what you monitor today.