Wastewater-Based Epidemiology Biomarkers: Analysis, Occurrence and Fate in Wastewater
A special issue of Toxics (ISSN 2305-6304). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2021) | Viewed by 4146
Special Issue Editors
2) Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS), The University of Queensland, 20 Cornwall Street, Woolloongabba, QLD 4102, Australia
Interests: wastewater-based epidemiology; analytical chemistry; environmental chemistry; (high-resolution) mass spectrometry; emerging contaminants; human exposure; risk assessment
Interests: emerging contaminants; (bio)transformation products; fate; ecotoxicology; analytical methods
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has developed into an innovative approach able to provide epidemiological and socio-economic information about lifestyle habits, substance use, exposure to toxicants present in the environment and food, as well as public health and wellbeing. WBE is based on the chemical analysis of specific human urinary excretion products (biomarkers) in untreated wastewater as indicators of consumption, providing crucial data on the activity of the population served by the specific wastewater treatment plant. Initially, WBE was applied to evaluate spatial and temporal illicit drug use trends across Europe, and then it was further expanded worldwide. WBE was also used to obtain evidence on other biomarkers such as tobacco, caffeine, pesticides, plasticizers, pharmaceuticals, and endogenous compounds. This well-established approach offers the possibility to collect near-real-time, cost-effective, and continuous data in contrast to other methodologies such as conventional population surveys and human biomonitoring studies. It can provide crucial information about public health that can be of interest for policy-making and national and international organizations and committees. In the future, WBE could serve as an “early warning system” to help the authorities to prevent the spread of epidemics and make effective interventions on use of illicit substances.
Dr. Nikolaos I. Rousis
Prof. Dr. Nikolaos S. Thomaidis
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- (illicit) drugs
- new psychoactive substances
- exposure biomarkers
- population biomarkers
- transformation products
- sampling
- stability experiments
- monitoring
- high-resolution mass spectrometry
- site- and event-specific studies
