Subedi Bikram
Department of Chemistry, Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2018;1810:141-147. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-8579-1_14.
Drug abuse is considered to be a national epidemic in many countries including the USA, and is associated with impaired social indicators including economic loss and adverse public health. The conventional methods of estimation of drug usage in communities are based on self-reported surveys, overdose or toxicological reports, drug-related crime statistics, and hospital admissions. Conventional methods suffer from several shortcomings including cost and time intensiveness, nonresponse bias, bias in the selection of sample population, and consumer's unawareness on the actual composition of used drugs. Sewage epidemiology utilizes the mass load of drugs in wastewater influent to estimate the drug usage in a community. Despite several challenges to the determination of the human excretion profile of drugs, the stability of drugs in wastewater, the dynamics of the population, sewage epidemiology provides several opportunities, including a cost-effective, comprehensive, noninvasive, and nearly real-time measure of trends of drug use over time.
药物滥用在包括美国在内的许多国家都被视为一种全国性的流行病，并且与包括经济损失和不良公共卫生在内的社会指标受损有关。社区中估计药物使用情况的传统方法基于自我报告调查、过量用药或毒理学报告、与药物相关的犯罪统计数据以及医院入院情况。传统方法存在几个缺点，包括成本高、耗时、无应答偏差、样本人群选择偏差以及消费者对所用药物实际成分的不了解。污水流行病学利用污水流入中的药物质量负荷来估计社区中的药物使用情况。尽管在确定药物的人体排泄特征、药物在废水中的稳定性、人群动态方面存在诸多挑战，但污水流行病学提供了几个机会，包括一种具有成本效益、全面、非侵入性且几乎实时衡量药物使用随时间变化趋势的方法。
