Estimating daily and diurnal variations of illicit drug use in Hong Kong: A pilot study of using wastewater analysis in an Asian metropolitan city

Lai, Foon Yin; Bruno, Raimondo; Leung, Ho Wing; Thai, Phong K.; Ort, Christoph; Carter, Steve; Thompson, Kristie; Mueller, Jochen F.

doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2013.09.003

Cited by 92 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…On the contrary, average loads of BE on Medellin (845 mg/day/1000inh) was higher than all studied European cities, with the only exception of the value found in Antwerp Zuid in 2013 that was of the same order. When comparing this data with countries or cities from outside Europe, the use of cocaine in Australia (Irvine et al, 2011;Lai et al, 2011) South Korea (Kim et al, 2015) and China (Khan et al, 2014;Lai et al, 2013) was lower, whereas average loads of BE in Brazil (Maldaner et al, 2012) and Martinique (Devault et al, 2014) (approximately 450 mg/day/ 1000inh, after re-calculation) were higher than in Bogotá, but generally did not exceed those observed in Medellin.…”

Section: Normalization Of Mass Loads and Estimation Of Drug Usementioning

confidence: 80%

“…This has allowed the estimation and comparison of drug use over time in up to 42 European cities Thomas et al, 2012). However, WBE has also been implemented in other continents such as Australia (Irvine et al, 2011;Prichard et al, 2012) and North America (Banta-Green et al, 2009;Devault et al, 2014;Metcalfe et al, 2010;Subedi and Kannan, 2014) and is starting to be applied in Asia (Khan et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2015;Lai et al, 2013). WBE has also been applied once in South America (Brazil) for the estimation of cocaine consumption (Maldaner et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Estimation of illicit drug use in the main cities of Colombia by means of urban wastewater analysis

Bijlsma

Botero-Coy

Rincón

et al. 2016

Science of The Total Environment

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Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) relies on the principle that traces of compounds, which a population is exposed to or consume, are excreted unchanged or as metabolites in urine and/or feces, and ultimately end up in the sewer network. Measuring target metabolic residues i.e. biomarkers in raw urban wastewater allows identifying the exposure or use of substances of interest in a community. Up to date, the most popular application of WBE is the estimation of illicit drug use and studies have been made mainly across Europe, which has allowed estimating and comparing drug use in many European cities. However, until now a comprehensive study applying WBE on the most frequently consumed illicit drugs has not been performed in South American countries. In this work, we applied this approach to samples from Colombia, selecting two of the most populated cities: Bogotá and Medellin. Several biomarkers were selected to estimate drug use of cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy), heroin and ketamine. Composite samples (24-h) were collected at the corresponding municipal wastewater treatment plants. Sample treatment was performed at location by applying solid-phase extraction (SPE). Before SPE, the samples were spiked with appropriate isotope labeled internal standards. In parallel, samples (spiked with the analytes under study at two concentration levels) were also processed for quality control. Analysis of influent wastewater was made by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, with triple quadrupole analyzer. Data shown in this paper reveal a high use of cocaine by the population of the selected Colombian cities, particularly from Medellin, while the use of other illicit drugs were low. The relevance of using quality control samples, particularly in collaborative studies, as those presented in this work, where research groups from different countries participate and where the samples had to be shipped overseas, is highlighted in this paper.

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Section: Normalization Of Mass Loads and Estimation Of Drug Usementioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimation of illicit drug use in the main cities of Colombia by means of urban wastewater analysis

Bijlsma

Botero-Coy

Rincón

et al. 2016

Science of The Total Environment

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“…Sampling for the wastewater analysis of drugs and pollutants in previous studies (Karolak et al, 2010;Postigo et al, 2010;Irvine et al, 2011;van Nuijs et al, 2011;Thomas et al, 2012;Lai et al, 2013) has taken place from influent samples from various WWTPs worldwide, however, the dilution factor encountered by potential analytes even at this stage would make the detection process from WWTP samples much more complex. Since it is viable to collect wastewater samples at the inlet pipe of wastewater treatment plants, this sampling location would be feasible both operationally and in line with the optimum sampling methodology.…”

Section: Wwtp Treatment Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The identification and quantification of these explosives and precursor chemicals in environmental samples can provide information regarding their spatial and temporal distribution within the wastewater system, and thus provide data that can offer insights to their provenance. This is an approach similar to that of "sewage epidemiology" used to back-calculate drug consumption per population (Zuccato et al, 2008;Loos et al, 2009;Karolak et al, 2010;Postigo et al, 2010;Valc arcel et al, 2010;Baker and Kasprzyk-Hordern, 2011;Irvine et al, 2011;van Nuijs et al, 2011;Thomas et al, 2012;Lai et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of trace peroxide explosives in environmental samples using solid phase extraction and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry

Gamble

Campos

Morgan

2017

Environmental Forensics

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This article presents solid phase extraction (SPE) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) methods for the trace detection of the peroxide explosives triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD). Furthermore, experimental studies use these methods to explore the efficiency of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) processes at removing trace levels of peroxide explosives from water samples to assess the application of the developed methods for the detection of explosives in the environment. The principal results of this study showed that the greatest removal of TATP and HMTD from spiked water samples occurred following the biological treatment stage, however, the WWTP processing did not completely remove all of the analytes from the water, suggesting that such chemicals could contaminate downstream river water samples. The toxicity of chemical pollutants is often determined by their concentration, however, even at trace levels, the monitoring of explosives in the natural environment could be extremely informative for the detection of criminal activity as well as long-term effects upon aquatic life. These findings also have significant implications for crime prevention and disruption approaches that can use this type of data as intelligence to guide investigations regarding the source and attribution of detected explosives.

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“…WBE was first introduced in 2005 in Italy (Zuccato et al, 2005) and has been particularly utilised in Europe Thomas et al, 2012) but has since expanded into China (Du et al, 2015;Khan et al, 2014), Hong Kong (Lai et al, 2013b), South Korea (Kim et al, 2015) Australia (Irvine et al, 2011;Lai et al, 2013a), Canada (Metcalfe et al, 2010) and the United States (Banta-Green et al, 2009;Subedi and Kannan, 2014).…”

Section: Wastewater-based Epidemiologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Advanced analytical tools for the investigation of licit and illicit drug residues in water

Bade¹

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The University of Queensland, Australia). It is divided into three sections and consists of six scientific articles and one review article (Scientific For my family Article 1).The first section consists of three research articles and deals with the use of high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) in the screening and occurrence of PIDs in environmental waters of three countries: Colombia, Italy and Spain. The use of different HRMS instruments (QTOF and LTQOrbitrap) combined with in-house and online databases of up to thousands of compounds enabled numerous compounds to be detected and identified. A continuously-updated in-house database of more than 1000 PIDs and metabolites was made incorporating their exact mass, and also adduct formation, fragment ions and retention time when a standard was available. This entire database was used for the first work, investigating influent and effluent WW as well as SW samples from Bogotá, Colombia, leading to the identification of 40 compounds across all samples (Scientific Article 2). A subset of approximately 100 of the most commonly identified compounds was used in the next work, looking at the use of two HRMS instruments (QTOF and Orbitrap) in the suspect screening of WW and SW samples from Italy and Spain, with up to 28 compounds at least detected (Scientific Article 3). Finally, a non-target screening approach was made using two advanced deconvolution software and incorporating two databases: one of 250 PIDs and the ChemSpider database, with more than 20 compounds being tentatively identified (Scientific Article 4).The second section consists of two research articles and covers the development and utilisation of two retention time prediction approaches in the identification of PIDs in waste and environmental water samples. Initially, a very simple approach was made, using only logKow and a combined in-house and Waters database of 595 reference standards. This led to a prediction accuracy of approximately 70-80% within a retention time window of ±2 minutes. A comparison was made to see whether reducing the mass extraction window incrementally from 50mDa to 5mDa would result in more peaks being removed than the prediction method.Summary ii It was found that even at the narrowest window investigated, this prediction method resulted in almost one quarter of all chromatographic peaks able to be removed as false positives (Scientific Article 5).While this simple approach showed itself quite useful, a more precise method was hoped to aid in the identification of transformation products for which no reference standards are available. Artificial neural networks were thus investigated and found to be much more precise, with up to 95% of all compounds being within a ±2 minute window, leading to the tentative identification of ten metabolites and transformation products and several other compounds for which standards were unavailable (Scientific Article 6).Finally, the third section consists of one research article on the quantitative analysis of new psychoactive substances (NPS) u...

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Estimating daily and diurnal variations of illicit drug use in Hong Kong: A pilot study of using wastewater analysis in an Asian metropolitan city

Cited by 92 publications

References 36 publications

Estimation of illicit drug use in the main cities of Colombia by means of urban wastewater analysis

Estimation of illicit drug use in the main cities of Colombia by means of urban wastewater analysis

Detection of trace peroxide explosives in environmental samples using solid phase extraction and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry

Advanced analytical tools for the investigation of licit and illicit drug residues in water

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