Citation:

Daughton, C. Monitoring wastewater for assessing community health: Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM). SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT. Elsevier BV, AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, 619-620:748-764, (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.11.102

Impact/Purpose:

A new concept is presented for assessing human health on a collective community-wide basis by the analysis of sewage for biomarkers of endogenous biochemical processes that reflect human health or disease. This new approach is called Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM). Envisioned is a monitoring network that operates in near-real time. It would be capable of providing time-trend measures of the collective status of community health and facilitating intercomparisons of health among different communities.

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, as well as for maintaining or promoting health. Seeking those interventions yielding the greatest benefit with respect to the allocation of resources is critical for making progress toward community sustainability, reducing health disparities, promoting social justice, and maintaining or improving collective health and well-being. More informative, faster, and less-costly approaches are needed for guiding investigation of cause-effect linkages involving communities and stressors originating from both the built and natural environments. One such emerging approach involves the continuous monitoring of sewage for chemicals that serve as indicators of the collective status of human health (or stress/disease) or any other facet relevant to gauging time-trends in community-wide health. This nascent approach can be referred to as Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM) and involves the monitoring of sewage for the information that resides in the form of natural and anthropogenic chemicals that enter sewers as a result of the everyday actions, activities, and behaviors of humans. Of particular interest is a specific embodiment of SCIM that would entail the targeted monitoring of a broad suite of endogenous biomarkers of key physiologic processes (as opposed to xenobiotics or their metabolites). This application is termed BioSCIM - an approach roughly analogous to a hypothetical community-wide collective clinical urinalysis, or to a hypothetical en masse human biomonitoring program. BioSCIM would be used for gauging the status or time-trends in community-wide health on a continuous basis. Envisioned is a monitoring network that could provide communities access to near real-time data reflecting collective health, disease, or stress, and which would also facilitate inter-community comparisons of health via a standardized methodology. This paper presents an update on the progress made with the development of the BioSCIM concept in the period of time since its original publication in 2012. Moreover, it offers insights on the next steps required for its continued development. One of the major challenges faced by the development of BioSCIM is the need for additional biomarkers of endogenous metabolic processes that are suitable for targeted monitoring. These biomarkers are needed to augment the information provided by the archetype biomarker that serves as the basis for the original concept - namely, the isoprostanes (which function as integrative measures of systemic oxidative stress). Also presented are new perspectives on some of the less-appreciated aspects of sewage that confound or complicate its monitoring for endogenous biomarkers as well as a new concept for dealing with the central problem of biomarker data normalization - an approach that bypasses the need to know the population size or the dilution of sewage

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