Infectious diseases are a global concern for public health resulting in high rates of infection with sub-sequent health and socio-economic impacts through resulting morbidity and mortality. The emergence of such diseases has motivated researchers to develop cost-effective, rapid and sensitive analytical methods and devices to better understand the transmission routes of infections within populations. To this end, rapid and low-cost diagnosis and testing devices for infectious diseases are attracting increasing amounts of attention, e.g., through using paper-based analytical devices (PADs). In this paper, the recent development of PADs is critically reviewed both for the diagnosis of inviduals and population health, by using devices for testing wastewater. Finally, the review also focuses on PADs for the analysis of bacteria and viruses in wastewater, together with a discussion on thee future development of PADs for rapid diagnosis and wastewater surveillance.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).