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Using Biomarkers in Sewage to Monitor Community-Wide Human Health: Isoprostances as Conceptual Prototype
Citation:
DAUGHTON, C. G. Using Biomarkers in Sewage to Monitor Community-Wide Human Health: Isoprostances as Conceptual Prototype . Damia Barcelo (ed.), SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT. Elsevier BV, AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, 424:16-38, (2012).
Impact/Purpose:
More efficient approaches are needed for revealing cause-effect linkages between environmental stressors and human health and for measuring overall aggregate health of smallarea populations. A new concept is presented - - community health assessment via Sewage Chemical Information Mining (SCIM) - - for quickly gauging overall, aggregate health status or trends for entire small-area populations. The approach - - BioSCIM - - would target analysis of raw sewage for specific biomarkers broadly associated with human disease, stress, or health. Major objectives are to: (i) catalyze development and broad application of SCIM to ultimately enable intra- and inter-population comparisons of aggregate health status and trends, and (ii) provide a new tool for aiding in the evaluation of linkages or causality in the exposure-effects continuum (and for establishing status, trends, and disparities in community-wide health).
Description:
Timely assessment of the aggregate health of small-area human populations is essential for guiding the optimal investment of resources needed for preventing, avoiding, controlling, or mitigating exposure risks. Seeking those interventions yielding the greatest benefit with respect to allocation of resources is essential for making progress toward community sustainability, for promoting social justice, and for maintaining or improving health and wellbeing. Lacking the means to quickly measure the status or changes in aggregate, communitywide health has long prevented determining where limited resources could be best directed for achieving optimal outcomes from investment of these resources and for quickly measuring change in outcomes resulting from investment of these resources.
URLs/Downloads:
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DAUGHTON 12-012 FINAL JOURNAL ARTICLE..PDF (PDF, NA pp, 660 KB, about PDF)