Prof Jochen Mueller leads the Emerging Environmental and Public Health Risks team at QAEHS. He leads and/or contributes to a wide range of national and international programs that focus on the monitoring of trace organic pollutants and trends in human exposure to trace contaminants.
Meet the Emerging Environmental and Public Health Risks research team.
Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large group of chemicals commonly used since the 1950s in a range of consumer and industrial applications. Due to their properties and widespread use, PFAS are frequently found in the environmental and detected in humans worldwide. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has identified to date more than 4,700 PFAS in use globally. Ninety percent of these have been identified as potential precursors to specific PFASs that bioaccumulate in humans (e.g. perfluoroalkyl acids, PFAAs). Transformation of PFAS precursors in the environment, or their metabolism in humans, leads to indirect exposure pathways for the same bioaccumulative PFAS.
Despite the high number of PFAS known to be in use, targeted biomonitoring typically targets only a limited number of approximately 30 analytes using tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). In Australia, 26 PFAS have been detected in human serum including four previously unreported compounds. Notably, current biomonitoring programs exclude most known precursors and have been slow to add new fluorinated compounds substituted by industry to replace those phased out of production.
In addition to the routinely monitored PFAS, 1,031 other PFAS were recently reported to occur in the environment, discovered using nontarget high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) techniques. Australians, and others elsewhere in the world, are therefore undoubtedly exposed to more PFAS compounds than those typically measured in human biomonitoring programs, either directly or through the transformation of precursors. Understanding of the PFAS exposome, i.e. the totality of human environmental exposures to PFAS, is therefore limited amongst scientists and stakeholders such as exposed individuals, the wider general public and public health regulators.
Current Research Projects
Remediation of PFAS contaminated soil using a soil washing treatment train
Current HDR Student Projects
Completed Projects
Assessing Effectiveness of PFAS Exposure Control in Exposed Communities and Firefighters
Firefighter Exposure Risks and Subsequent Reproduction Effects
Fate and Transport of Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in the Soil Environment
The Australian population is exposed to a multitude of chemicals that include environmental pollutants such as pesticides, flame retardants, perfluorinated chemicals, personal care products and metals. Some of these may be associated with adverse health effects in highly exposed and/or vulnerable subgroups. Exposure to these chemicals in the general or specific populations (or individuals) may be determined by the collection and analysis of blood serum and/ or urine; commonly referred to as human biomonitoring (HBM). HBM data has become a crucial tool for government policy makers in the legislation and regulation of chemicals. HBM is a vital starting point to identify age groups, sexes, geographical regions or chemicals that need to be targeted for further study. In 2009, Prof Mueller at QAEHS was awarded funding through the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Water, Heritage and the Arts to establish the Australian Environmental Specimen Bank (AESB). The AESB is the first and only national biobank for the combined storage of both human and environmental samples that enable retrospective studies related to exposure assessment and environmental toxicology.
Current Research Projects
Novel testing strategies for endocrine disruptors in the context of developmental neurotoxicity
Establishing a National Program to Characterise Indoor Chemical Exposures
Improving Indoor Environment Quality by Removing Semivolatile Organic Compounds from our Air
Current HDR Student Projects
Environmental Fate, Distribution and Human Exposure to Neonicotinoids in Australia
Temporal Trend Analysis and Optimization of Exposure Monitoring Designs
Exposure to Plastic Additives and their Association with Oxidative Stress Biomarkers
Chemical Contamination in Humans and Links to Neurodegenerative Diseases
Understanding Food Insecurity and Dietary Habits: A Comprehensive Analysis
Wastewater is known to contain the accumulated biomarkers of human metabolism that directly reflects the exposure and stressors placed upon all those in a contributing community. Quantitatively measuring specific biomarkers in wastewater collated from defined communities allows the averaged patterns of chemical exposure to be evaluated with the potential to provide excellent spatial and temporal coverage. An important, well recognised issue associated with the use of a wastewater-based exposure monitoring approach is that the level measured in the wastewater may not directly reflect population exposure for certain chemicals. To date no direct link has been made between population-based human biomonitoring and population-based wastewater studies.
Wastewater analysis is an alternative approach for monitoring the population level consumption of a substance based on the analysis of residues of the substance or its metabolite(s) in urine that is pooled in influent wastewater. Wastewater analysis has the advantage of being cost-effective and capable of high resolution temporal and geographic sampling compared with conventional epidemiological methods. Quantitative estimation of the use of a particular type of drug or product is dependent on both the measurement of a biomarker specific to the drug or product, as well as knowing the percentage of that biomarker excreted following human consumption when compared to the quantity consumed.
A recent example of a highly successful application of wastewater analysis to estimate substance use is the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program (NWDMP). This program is funded by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, which provides reliable data to inform policy and shape local responses to drug supply and demand. The NWDMP, performed in collaboration with QAEHS researchers, has regularly reported the level of substance use in >50% of the Australian population each quarter since 2016. In Australia, in addition to the NWDMP, our group has also used wastewater analysis to estimate spatial and temporal trends of nicotine use in different communities across the country.
Current Research Projects
Exposure mapping – combining wastewater analysis with human biomonitoring
National wastewater drug monitoring program
Transforming our Understanding of the Chemical Exposome
Understanding Australia by Analysing Wastewater During the Census 2021
Facilitating Detection of New Psychoactive Substances in Wastewater
Current HDR Student Projects
Sources and Fate of Contaminants in Aquatic Ecosystems Focusing on Persistence in Real Environments
Fingerprinting Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater
Facilitating Detection of New Psychoactive Substances in Wastewater (PhD)
Completed Projects
Wastewater Analysis for the Detection of World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited Substances
Innovative Sampling Strategies for Improved Wastewater-based Epidemiology
The Australian population is exposed to a multitude of chemicals that include environmental pollutants such as pesticides, flame retardants, per-fluorinated chemicals, personal care products and metals. Some of these may be associated with adverse health effects in highly exposed and/or vulnerable subgroups. Exposure to these chemicals in the general or specific populations (or individuals) may be determined by the collection and analysis of blood serum and/ or urine; commonly referred to as human biomonitoring (HBM). HBM data have become crucial tools for government policy makers in the legislation and regulation of chemicals.
One of the key challenges in the environmental and exposure sciences is to establish experimental evidence of the role of chemical exposure in human and environmental systems. Non-target analysis employing high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) has been established over the past years as one of the key approaches for tackling this complexity and allows for the retrospective screening of previously archived HRMS data. The sharing and community curation of HRMS data allows the potential to globally collaborate and share data through an online platform in order to optimise the way emerging chemical threats are identified.
The archiving of HRMS data also allows for data to be processed retrospectively, for example to investigate the occurrence of a newly identified compound or simply one that was not considered at the time of analysis. This has even led to proposals for the establishment of data repositories, akin to environmental data banks, where digital information can be safely stored for future retrospective analysis. As far as we are aware there have not been any coordinated studies to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in environmental samples through performing retrospective analysis on HRMS data acquired using different instrumental platforms and data processing software.
Current Research Projects
Developing Protocols to Measure Plastic Chemicals in Human Brain, Blood and Urine