Wastewater Epidemiology: Studying geographical and temporal trends in the use of medicines and illicit drugs to increase environmental and health sustainability

Name: Marta

Surname: Massano

Tutor (surname): Salomone

website: https://www.chimica.unito.it/do/gruppi.pl/Show?_id=du5p

Wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) recently emerged as an essential and complementary methodology for the evaluation of pharmaceutical and illicit drugs prevalence, by means of quantification of either the parent drugs or their human-specific metabolites in wastewater. Furthermore, water pollution by substances is becoming an unavoidable environmental issue of emerging concern, making the water quality monitoring crucial to safeguard its healthy supply to citizens. There are several conventional methods to determine the rate of medicines and drugs use in a community: these consist of self-reported investigations, prescriptions, overdose/toxicology reports, and drug-related crime statistics; however, these methods suffer from high costs, time delays, low coverage and errors, including non-response bias and bias in the selection of sample population. For these reasons, wastewater epidemiology is rapidly establishing itself as a descriptive approach, since it exploits the concentration of target compounds of anthropogenic origin (and/or their metabolites) in the wastewater.

The aim of the project is to develop and validate effective and robust analytical procedures that allow us to investigate the consumption trends of pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol and drugs of abuse on our territory and identify the emergence of new substances. Where possible, water sampling and analysis will take place in the water entering and leaving the purification plants. Collaborations will be established with different institutions and operators to simultaneously follow the scenarios in different contexts contemporaneously. The large amount of data will be processed using sophisticated multivariate statistical "machine learning" tools and the information obtained will represent a precious resource for activating new health and prevention policies in the area. The development of appropriate water resources monitoring strategies will allow the pursuit of some of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); Goal 6 ("Ensure the availability and management of all sustainable water and sanitation") and Goal 14 ("Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for development sustainable").