Urban water profiling to inform the state of the environment and public health

A new approach in public health epidemiology utilizing urban water fingerprinting with hyphenated mass spectrometry techniques has been recently pioneered to provide near real-time measurements of public health. Urban water fingerprinting provides anonymised but comprehensive and objective information on the health status of a population and surrounding environment in real time as urban water (sewerage system and receiving aqueous environment) pools the endo- and exogenous biomarkers of that population.
This cutting-edge approach of extracting epidemiological information from urban water emerged from Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE). WBE was developed in a strong cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary collaborative ethos within SCORE (www.score-cost.eu) and SEWPROF teams (www.sewprofitn.eu), and although still in its infancy, WBE is currently used to report on community-wide illicit drug use trends and feeds into the Europe-wide evidence based early warning system by European Agency for Drugs and Drug Addiction (http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/wastewater-analysis).

This talk will introduce the concept and its rapid advances. It will focus on pharmacologically active compounds in urban water and their stereochemistry in the context of environmental risk assessment. It will also explore new avenues in the utilization of urban water fingerprinting in the assessment of population health and health risk prediction.