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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-have-you-been-excreting? dept.

Indices of health under our feet

A treasure trove of information relevant to human and environmental health is hiding in an unexpected place. Samples of wastewater from homes, institutions, towns and cities around the world can now be probed for valuable data concerning community well-being, antibiotic use and resistance, recreational substance consumption and abuse, biomarkers of disease as well as environmental hazards and degradation.

This rapidly emerging health surveillance technique, termed wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), is an economical and powerful tool. It can teach us much about large populations contributing into a centralized sewerage system during the course of a full 24-hour cycle.

In a pair of new studies, Rolf Halden, director of the ASU Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering and author for the 2020 Book Environment, describes the process and highlights important new findings extracted from the municipal wastewater most of us contribute to on a daily basis.

[...] Advances in WBE technologies and applications are progressing rapidly. The method offers a low-cost strategy for obtaining health and environmental data on a local, regional, national and even continental scale. It can provide valuable information with acute spatial and temporal resolution. Because the method aggregates community-wide data, it is non-invasive and ensures the privacy of the population under study.

In addition to its ability to measure ingestion rates of drugs including cocaine and opioids, WBE has been proposed as a means of identifying exposure to agents including pesticides, personal care products, infectious pathogens, persistent organic pollutants, as well as for tracking community-wide incidence of illnesses including diabetes, allergies, stress-induced disorders and cancer.

[...] WBE represents an attractive alternative to community-wide monitoring through self-reported surveys, which may introduce sampling and reporting biases and are often comparatively costly to administer; how much more expensive, was one of the questions investigated in the study.

[...] In addition to monitoring health indices related to behavior, WBE could ultimately provide a low-cost means of carrying out infectious disease surveillance across populations, providing an early-warning system to alert researchers to disease outbreaks in near real time, within as little as 24 hours.

Journal Reference:

  • Erin M. Driver, Adam Gushgari, Jing Chen, et al. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine consumption on a public U.S. university campus determined by wastewater-based epidemiology, Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138492)
  • Olga E. Hart, Rolf U. Halden. Simulated 2017 nationwide sampling at 13,940 major U.S. sewage treatment plants to assess seasonal population bias in wastewater-based epidemiology, Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138406)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:19PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:19PM (#1015195)

    For example, a high level of kebab byproducts could indicate a Muslim infestation. Unfortunately, doesn't work for H1-B Indians since they bypass the municipal wastewater system.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:20AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:20AM (#1015210)

    Could also be a way of tracking excessive Ethanol use.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:12AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:12AM (#1015228)

      Won't work, most Indian reservations are still on septic systems.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:35AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:35AM (#1015216)

    Muslims and Indians would find your post funny, too - their culture do not lack sense of humor - if it wasn't for all the nasty racism.

    As for H1-Bs, can you honestly blame the Indian outsourcing firms? Over the corporate America?

    Indian firms are doing what it can to do business. Corporate America is selling out their country/their own people for personal/class profit. There would be no outsourcing if Corporate America didn't push for it.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:22AM (2 children)

      by RS3 (6367) on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:22AM (#1015247)

      Agreeing with you wholeheartedly, taking it a step further: Corporate America is doing what you'd expect the machine to do: maximum (short-term) profit. Like the "Terminator", that's what he does, that's all he does.

      Which is why (unfortunately) we need governments- to control harmful behavior. Unfortunately, governments, being made up of people, are vulnerable to greed, corruption, and short-sighted stupidity.

      Wouldn't it be amazing if our government actually polled us, as in We The People, to find out how the mass public feels about "outsourcing", rather than put on a show acting like they care, but only listening to lobbyists?

      Please do not misunderstand me, I'm all for- balanced trade- in goods and services.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:37AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:37AM (#1015251)

        There are polls done all the time. They show consistent, large majority support for liberal policies year after year. Americans are liberal. There just isn't a party to vote for.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:41AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:41AM (#1015346)

        Americans like to consume cheap stuff, which can only be cheap if manufacturing is outsourced since greedy unions drive up prices. So stop shopping at Walmart and your China problem will go away.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:10PM (#1015435)

    Another good reason to piss in the shower.