Pioneering a Transdisciplinary Urban Surveillance System for Human Papilloma Virus with Vulnerable Communities

In 2023, Austria extended its national vaccination program for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), joining WHO’s call to eliminate cervical cancer and expanding its goals with a gender-neutral policy. Yet, the lack of any HPV surveillance system poses severe challenges in assessing the impact of vaccination, the evolutionary consequences on circulating HPV genotypes, and the basic sociality of HPV within dense urban environments. This project proposes a novel transdisciplinary approach which integrates sequencing-based genomic epidemiology, mixed-method public health research, and agent-based modelling to tackle these interconnected challenges. We will map viral population dynamics onto urban social dynamics, unveiling transmission networks and contributing to prevention of HPV-linked cancers. Partnering with an NGO that supports underserved patients, volunteer HPV swabbing will be enhanced through social participatory methods, and complemented by a novel pipeline to detect population-wide circulating HPV genotypes from wastewater to test the risk of high-impact variants and indirect effects of vaccination. Our pioneering approach tackles existing socioeconomic inequalities and gender disparities with an additional focus on boys and men. This transdisciplinary strategy pushes the boundaries of OneHealth in practice, with the potential of serving as a blueprint for effective prevention and multi-system surveillance of infectious diseases in the urban environment more generally.