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chromas writes:

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