Using Sewage Epidemiology To Investigate The Consumption Of Nicotine

Smoking is harmful to the health of the human body and induces the economic burden of the country’s public health.A cross-sectional survey method is the main method to investigate the tobacco consumption behavior questionnaire with long time existence,high cost,and heavy workload.In order to overcome the shortcomings of traditional method,epidemiological method was applied to the sewage tobacco consumption.The concentrations and consumption of representative and addictive substance of tobacco in 11 wastewater treatment plants(WWTP)in Dalian were evaluated in this study.Twenty four-hours comprehensive sewage samples were collected using automatic sampler to analyze the temporal and spatial variations of sewage samples in different WWTPs.The samples were analyzed after a solid phase extraction with reverse-phase cartridges using chromatography-mass spectrography.In this study,cotinine(COT)and nicotine(NIC)were all detected in one-month samples from LSH WWTP,with the concentration of 2.17-32.58 ng/mL and 0.41-1.70 ng/mL.The average consumption of NIC was 184.5±62.5 g/d,with a range of 75.2-316.6 g/d.Besides,the mean concentrations of NIC and COT in 11 WWTPs were 1.46±0.50 ng/mL and 9.39±3.96 ng/mL.The average amount of NIC and the number of cigarettes consumed per adults smokers were 6.18±3.26 mg/d and 10.4±5.5 CPD.A significant rule was found that the consumption of NIC in suburban were higher than in urban.The uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of the mass load of NIC and the number of cigarettes consumed per smoker were assessed using the Monte Carlo simulation.The results reveal that the uncertainty will increase with the increasing number of model parameter.The sensitivity analysis shows that the three parameters of the yield of NIC during smoking,the content of NIC in one cigarette,and the excretion percentage of COT is of total importance.Sewage epidemiology can predict tobacco use in real time,objectively,and accurately,and the results is in accordance with existing records.