Is the Mystery of Eternal Youth Locked in Sewage Sludge?

If you want to know which communities are taking which drugs — where do you go? Want to know the use of antibiotics in the local area — would you ask a doctor? In fact — who would you ask to get accurate information on how healthy a specific community is based on the drugs — both prescription and illegal — and the food a community consumes and generally, how healthy people are?

If you ask the people in the community, how do you know you are getting an accurate or truthful answer. So welcome to the science of sewage epidemiology — analysing our number ones and twos — not a job many suggest to the careers officers at school.

The answer is in the poo

Measuring the impacts on the general population of health interventions like anti-smoking or anti-drug promotions used to entail an unwieldy process of handing out surveys and hoping people completed them truthfully or asking people to provide a sample — both processes being costly and time consuming. But by evaluating wastewater for revealing indicators of human behaviour, experts can derive information about exactly how healthy a community is--without having to test anyone.

"How do you know that folks are consuming more fruits, how will you know if they're exercising more? How will you assess those things?" says Joshua Steele, a postdoctoral student who works in the Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. "We are able to get those concrete metrics because irrespective of where you are and what you're doing, you have to use the wastewater system."

Chromatography has its measure

Just about everything we eat or drink goes through our bodies and out into the sewage system — making sewage an ideal indicator of a community’s health. As Rolf Halden, the Director of the Biodesign Center at ASU states “We have access to stool and urine and blood, but for a whole city. So now our clients, or our patients, are the cities rather than individuals.”

Measuring drug residues or nutrients in sewage has in recent years increased due in part to the advances in technology — and chromatography is one of those technologies that has helped find out what is in our poo. Some of the improvements in liquid chromatography – mass spectrometry are discussed in the article, Capillary Flow LC-MS Unites Sensitivity and Throughput.

Biomarkers could point to a healthier future

Using the latest chromatography techniques, analysts can now isolate biomarkers from the sewage samples — a biomarker is simply a measurable indicator of a biological condition. This means scientists can measure how human behaviour changes — whether because of positive changes like a population taking more exercise or a negative change like alcohol consumption going up.

This gives health professionals the ability to assess the impact of health programmes on communities — and if the municipal wastewater system allows it — to even compare health programmes in different areas of a town or city. Our future health could really be determined from the sewers.