Division/Committee: [ENVR: Division of Environmental Chemistry]

The natural and built environment are considered influential determinants of a myriad of human health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, asthma, and diabetes. Potentially threatening environmental exposures in both urban and rural settings, such as air and water pollution, food contamination, and micro- and/or nano-plastic pollution, have been determined to impact human health, and continue to worsen to due to impacts from climate change. Studies that incorporate individual human biomonitoring are often challenged by the ability to operate at a rate comparable to disease incidence as multiple exposures often occur simultaneously, are associated with numerous types of disease, and are typically linked with various socioeconomic factors. These limitations combined with expensive and labor-intensive investigation serve as barriers to rapid data acquisition and analysis. Thus, alternative approaches are needed in order to predict a potential threat, monitor effectiveness of interventions, and inform relevant stakeholders to invoke policy change. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a rapidly evolving scientific discipline that leverages community wastewater to understand population health in near real-time. This is accomplished by utilizing targeted analytical measurements to analyze human excreted biomarkers in composited wastewater that are indicative of various aspects of human health, behavior, exposure, and activity. Historically used as a tool for population-level illicit and licit substance monitoring, WBE was not more universally accepted until the COVID-19 global pandemic, where use of wastewater monitoring to track viral spread between and across communities proved as a viable tool to produce near real-time, actionable data to enhance the public health response. Due to this overwhelming success, the purpose of this symposium would be to encourage collaboration and further investigation of conducting wastewater-informed population-level health assessments specific to environmental exposures. Relevant work would include: (i) Expanding biomarker suite for population-level exposure assessments; measuring chemical and biological indicators of exposures and associated human impact and/or disease, (ii) Leverage wastewater-informed data to prompt near real-time, targeted interventions, assess efficacy, and create predictive models for future events, (iii) Develop risk assessments with associated outbreaks, and (iv) Discuss use of WBE to influence policy change, reduce health disparities, and support vulnerable global populations. Information obtained would be of great interest to medical and public health professionals, engineers, environmental epidemiologists, community stakeholders, and more, and could provide a foundational framework for further expansion.

Devin Bowes

University of South Carolina

Appearances