What is it about?
This is the first published article to formalize the concept of SCIM (sewage chemical information mining) and the use of SCIM to estimate the size of small-area (local) human populations: Analysis of Small-Area Populations by Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (ASAP-SCIM). A biomarker with great potential for the use of SCIM in the real-time measurement of population size was determined to be coprostanol - the major sterol produced by microbial reduction of cholesterol in the colon.
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Why is it important?
ASAP-SCIM represents the first proposed use of monitoring sewage for biomarkers (particularly endogenous human biomarkers) to quickly gauge the collective status of any number of indicators of the specific or general status of public health or disease at the community-wide level. This particular, first application offers the first means beyond tedious census taking to estimate population size. SCI M offers the opportunity to view communities from the new perspective of a "collective patient."
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Real-time estimation of small-area populations with human biomarkers in sewage, The Science of The Total Environment, January 2012, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.11.015.
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Using biomarkers in sewage to monitor community-wide human health: Isoprostanes as conceptual prototype
This is the follow-on, companion article and presents the second application of the SCIM concept - namely its use for measuring collective, community-wide public health (or disease/stress). This particular application of SCIM - termed BioSCIM - could potentially lead to the paradigm of combining human and ecological communities as a single patient – as an interconnected whole.
First mention of the SCIM concept in the published literature
On page 100 of this article, the SCIM concept was first proposed for monitoring chemicals (especially endogenous biomarkers) occurring in sewage as collective indicators of the specific or general status of public health or disease at the community-wide level: Daughton CG "Illicit Drugs: Contaminants in the Environment and Utility in Forensic Epidemiology," Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, 2011, 210:59-110; doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-7615-4_3
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