Community Sewage Sensors for Monitoring Public Health

摘要

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been shown to be an innovative approach for monitoring drug use in communities by quantifying drug residues (so-called drug biomarkers) in sewage. WBE has thus far been validated by assessing illicit drug use trends across Europe, with the evaluation of spatial differences and temporal changes in the levels of specific biomarkers in sewage from 42 cities in 21 European countries (total population 24.74 million). It is hypothesized that sewage contains additional information on the lifestyle, health and pollutant exposure of a community which could also be obtained by the analysis of sewage biomarkers. In fact, feces and urine from either humans or animals carry many biomarkers and pathogens, which could enter the sewer system from a carrier of the disease in the community, for example, patients at hospitals. Those pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites, in wastewater are hazardous to humans because they might cause epidemics in population. However, human hazards can be minimized if those pathogens could be monitored at an early stage in the community. Unlike illicit drug use trends, infectious diseases require rapid or even real-time detection to assess whether there is a need for the containment of the disease carriers to certain areas and prevent the development of an epidemic. To this end, there is a need to develop novel analytical tools that are able to accurately and rapidly monitor low levels of biomarkers/pathogens with minimal sample processing by unskilled personnel at the site of sample collection. Emerging biosensing technologies will play a key role in the in situ quantitative analysis of biomarkers and pathogens in sewage due to rapid response times, low cost, minimal sample processing, high data resolution and ability to operate remotely. Community sewage sensors employed to detect biomarkers of health and diseases at a population-level have therefore the clear potential to provide real-time data for the assessment of community-wide health.