[We all live in the environment, and some of the most
daunting public health challenges of the 21st century
involve environmental pollution. ]
take up to an hour. DESI-MS may be useful for large-scale monitoring of drug quality. However, it is not yet ready for consumer use. So Dr. Fernandez is collaborating with Michael
Green of the CDC to develop a technology that would require a boxed testing kit and a cell
phone. So what about Dr. Green’s work?
“He came up with a method where you will use your cell phone to check on the quality
of your medicine. It’s based on simple chemistry. You do a colorimetric reaction, your
drug with a given reagent will develop a certain color, and then you take a picture
with your cell phone and then you process that picture through software that will
measure the absorbance, and you can relate that to a calibration curve and you can
know that your drug is not only genuine, but that it has the right amount of the active
ingredients.”
We all live in the environment, and some of the most daunting public health challenges of
the 21st century involve environmental pollution. Confronting those challenges is a little-known group of researchers who combine science and detective work in a discipline known
as environmental forensics.
“Environmental forensics is related to the identification of contaminants in groundwater and in the environment in general and basically we’re looking for these compounds
because it’s necessary to find out what the contamination is in the first place and then
to figure out where it came from, who was responsible for it, how long it’s been there,
whether or not it is degrading. In a lot of cases, the aim of all these investigations is to
find out who’s responsible and who’s going to pay for the cleanup.”
That was Paul Philp of the University of Oklahoma, who in August reported on his group’s
work in identifying common groundwater contaminants at the ACS national meeting in
Philadelphia.
“In groundwater the types of chemicals that we’re looking at range from compounds
such as MTBE — methyl tertiary butyl ether — which was used until recently as an
oxygenate in gasoline; chlorinated solvents such as TCE, which are used at dry cleaning facilities and at military bases for cleaning engine parts and machinery; the BTEX
compounds — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene — which are the common
contaminants that arise from gasoline. There are some pesticides that we look at that
are in groundwater. There’s a wide range of compounds, basically.”
Awash in Trash
While Dr. Philp is concerned about the fate of industrial chemicals, William T. Cooper at
Florida State University is helping solve a potential health-related pollution problem that
every one of us contributes to — municipal landfills. People in the United States produce
more than 250 million tons of solid waste each year. Most of that winds up in landfills. Dr.
Cooper explains:
“Surprisingly enough, when our household wastes are put into a landfill they degrade,
and they exude a lot of very complicated chemicals that filter down through the waste
and reach the bottom of the landfill.… And indeed, it’s so concentrated in these materials that we can’t normally send it to a waste-water treatment plant.”
