Urban environmental media: hazards, exposure route & modelled health impacts

This project will: (i) review existing work of metal/loid distribution in urban environmental media, exposure routes and modelling human health impacts; together with biomonitoring reference values for arsenic, lead , cadmium and mercury (ii) systematically determine the concentration, speciation and mineralogical (as appropriate) associations of arsenic, lead, cadmium and/or mercury, in key environmental media from representative sites around Greater Manchester ; (iii) evaluate representative human exposure through a combination of food frequency and behaviour questionnaires and biomonitoring of urine, hair, nails, blood and breath condensates as appropriate; (iv) develop models of public health impacts arising from these exposures; and (v) develop risk management options for the Greater Manchester authority to consider, along with other instruments, to cost effectively reduce public health non-communicable disease burden arising from environmental chemical exposures in the Greater Manchester area.
A scoping study of the relative importance of various element/exposure route combinations will be carried out to enable more focussed studies to be executed on the most important of these. It is anticipated that this may well lead to a closer focussing on work on:
(i) Mineralogical controls on exposures from airborne particulates
(ii) Tracking particulate (e.g. PM10, PM25) exposure with personalised samplers coupled with GIS tracker data
(iii) Exposure to arsenic in rice of particularly vulnerable communities
(iv) Metal/metalloid exposure via drinking water
The work will build upon recently completed investigations of (i) arsenic exposure through private water supplies, food and soil in south-west England (Middleton et al., 2016a, 2016b, 2016c) and (ii) arsenic exposure and genotoxicity through rice in India (Mondal and Polya, 2008; Mondal et al., 2008; Mondal et al., 2010, Banerjee et al., 2013; Polya et al., 2016), by the Manchester Arsenic Research Group and of novel breath condensate biomonitoring of chromium by HSL (Cr(III) & Cr(VI) Leese, Morton et al., 2016); and lastly (iii) field studies (Hg; Guedron et al., 2014) and statistical modelling of environmental hazards (As; Sovann and Polya, 2014) and biomonitoring data (Smolders, Warren et al., 2014)