What Else Can the Analysis of Sewage for Urinary Biomarkers Reveal About Communities?

摘要

Public health monitoring and evaluation is an essential part of all community health programs with the overall purpose of mapping the current level of health in a community and measuring the success of programs aimed at improving it. Public health agencies worldwide face the significant challenge as how to quickly and reliably evaluate the overall health of a population. One solution may simply lie beneath our feet. Recently an approach based on the analysis of specific urinary biomarkers in wastewater collated from defined populations has been used to determine the level of illicit drug use and even proposed as a method for drug testing athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games.1'2 This approach, which has attracted the attention of international drug monitoring agencies, such as the European Monitoring Centre for Drug and Drug Additction,also has the potential to provide a means of rapidly (and quantitatively) assessing factors related to health and illness within a community. In its current form, the quantitative measurement of health specific biomarkers (i.e., drug biomarkers), in the collective sewage from populations, has been used to study the illicit drug use habits of numerous communities. The level of drug residues present in the sewage reflects the amount of a particular drug that has been consumed by the population served by the sewer network under investigation. The approach has been applied in Italy, Belgium, Spain, UK, Croatia, France, Ireland, Norway, USA, Canada, and