Tobacco down the Drain? — Chromatography Investigates

How can you get a direct measurement of consumption? Asking people to answer surveys or monitoring how much of an item is sold will only get you so close — especially if it is something that society frowns on like cigarettes, alcohol or drugs. It would be extremely difficult to get a measurement of everything entering someone’s body.

Record keeping? Have you ever tried keeping an accurate food diary, or been asked by the doctor how many units of alcohol you drink in a week (never more than 21 honest). So what about measuring the waste produced, can this give a better idea of what we consume? Welcome to sewage epidemiology.

What is sewage epidemiology?

Defining sewage in this instance is simple — it is the excrement and urine that goes down the toilet. Combining that with epidemiology — which is the study of patterns, effects and causes in a population — and sewage epidemiology is using the information scientists can glean from our bodily wastes to estimate consumptions by a population.

Sewage epidemiology has its origins in monitoring illegal drugs in communities — using the information to monitor drug usage in different populations and changes in drug use. Scientists collect untreated sewage samples and analyse them for drugs and drug metabolites. Chromatography can play a part in this work as discussed in the article, Direct Analysis of Urinary Opioids and Metabolites by Mixed-mode µElution SPE Combined with UPLC/MS/MS for Clinical Research.

The analysis then needs to be applied to the population using information like drug concentration, wastewater flow rate and population size. One of the advantages is that the method can supply real-time data and by linking the monitoring data with other drug information — it allows changes in health policies or drug usage can be seen relatively quickly.

Tobacco monitoring

Although society considers illegal drug use to be a concern, there is a legal drug that kills many more people in a year — tobacco and smoking. In the UK alone, over 100,000 people die each year from smoking related illnesses and smoking costs the NHS over £2 billion per year. Governments around the world put in place regulations and policies to try and reduce the number of people smoking. But how can you assess whether the policies are having an effect?

Sewage epidemiology has been used to monitor these changes — but most methods rely on the analysis of nicotine and cotinine (nicotine’s metabolite) in wastewater to estimate smoking levels. As part of the action to reduce smoking involves nicotine patches or the use of electronic cigarettes which contain nicotine, current methods will not give an accurate picture.

Researchers from the University of South Australia have recently published a study in Drug testing and Analysis suggesting two other alkaloids could be used to monitor tobacco use in wastewater. The alkaloids — anabasine and anatabine — are not found in the replacement therapies, only in dried tobacco.

So the next you flush — somebody might be monitoring.

Image by pakura via pixabay