Collaborative Research: Wastewater exposome as an untapped source for understanding air pollution burden in environmental justice communities

Chronic diseases are a leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. Exposure to air pollution has been linked to asthma, respiratory diseases, and lower cognitive ability. Once inhaled, air pollution metabolites can be found in urine, providing direct evidence of human exposure. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the link between air pollution, urine markers of pollution exposure, and wastewater monitoring in underserved communities. The benefit of utilizing wastewater monitoring is that it avoids the need for blood draws and urine sampling to understand community wide exposure or disease prevalence. While this specific project focuses on air pollution, community wastewater monitoring holds great potential as a more rapid means of assessing the prevalence of many diseases such as cancer or mental health disorders. Additional benefits to society result from the co-generation and dissemination of knowledge with underserved communities through high school outreach and community meetings. Investment in non-communicable disease prevention measures give a $5.6 return for every $1 spent. Improved community surveillance measures could facilitate earlier and targeted public health interventions. This project will develop community non-communicable disease surveillance tools utilizing wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) methods. The overall aim of the project is to demonstrate that wastewater carries community exposome signals associated with air pollution that can be used in environmental justice communities as direct evidence of adverse health effects. The project will focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged communities with higher air pollution burdens of respirable particulate matter (PM2.5) and gas-phase polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Multiple direct and indirect lines of evidence will be used including urine and feces associated extracellular microRNA monitoring in wastewater (i.e., transcriptomics). Pollution exposure will be validated through mass spectroscopy-based detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon metabolites in wastewater (i.e., metabolomics) and air sampling using passive biological collectors and dynamic indoor and outdoor sampling in disadvantaged communities with higher air pollution exposure (i.e., environmental justice). The project will co-generate knowledge in the environmental justice community by including Title 1, minority-majority high schools and community members in the sample collection and dissemination of the results through community public meetings. While this project is focused on air pollution exposure, the wastewater-based epidemiology approach can more broadly benefit society understand a wide variety of non-communicable diseases associated with environmental exposures, metal health disorders, and various other diseases (e.g., cancer, kidney failure, alcoholism). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.