Wastewater-Based Epidemiology as a Novel Biomonitoring Tool to Evaluate Human Exposure To Pollutants

Abstract

Humans are continuously exposed to pollutants by different routes, and human biomonitoring (HBM) is the tool commonly used to assess exposure to chemicals by measuring parent substances or metabolites in human specimens. These data are vital for health impact assessment and to support environmental and health policy-making in public health programs. However, HBM studies have some limitations, such as sampling biases, long realization time, complexity of data elaboration to extrapolate results to the whole population, high costs and ethical issues. This because HBM includes a large number of individuals to overtake the wide variability of individual excretion profiles and extrapolate data to the entire population.