Smoking is estimated to cause more than seven million premature deaths annually and the number of global smokers continues to increase. Monitoring tobacco use in the population is of high interest to public health. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) was proposed as an alternative approach for nicotine consumption. However, increasing use of non-tobacco nicotine products, such as those used for nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) (e.g., gum, patch, oral inhaler), and vaping products (e.g., e-cigarettes), can contribute to the mass loads of cotinine and hydroxycotinine in wastewater and lead to overestimation of tobacco use if cotinine and hydroxycotinine are used as WBE biomarkers.
The current project evaluated utilised pooled urine samples and wastewater samples to estimate the average per capita loads of nicotine metabolites, anabasine, and anatabine. Through comparing the urinary loads with wastewater loads, this project evaluates the suitability of anabasine and anatabine for estimating tobacco use by WBE and estimate their excretion factors. We subsequently utilised anabasine to estimate tobacco use from a selected catchment and compared the results with tobacco sales data for validation purpose.
Research Outputs
Grant Support
The Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, The University of Queensland gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Queensland Health. The authors express our thanks to the relevant personnel in the wastewater treatment plant for their assistance in collecting the samples and information provided. We would also like to thank Sullivan and Nicolaides Pathology for the urine sample resources. J.W.O. is the recipient of a National Health and Medical Research Council Investigator Grant (2009209) funded by the Australian Government. The study was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage project (LP180100715).
