Dear Readers,
Several years back I visited a small vendor booth at a Pittcon meeting. Then I stopped to talk with an owner/manager of a small company that manufactures arsenate test strips. The owner and I shared a philosophy that impact on environmental quality and public health is enhanced by inexpensive, stable, and easy to use point diagnostics. Arsenic in water is a major health problem in eastern India and Bangladesh. It also occurs in the United States. Many exhibitions at Pittcon meetings display sophisticated instruments incorporating the latest technologies requiring trained operators. Many of these can measure arsenic. Yet small innovative technology for point of use diagnostics can have a significant impact on environmental public health.
Earlier in my career, I was visiting the environmental research laboratories at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This laboratory boarders of the vast wine, apple and cherry growing region. The wines were good but the scientists I worked with told me that if you have a fruit tree or grape vine in your yard, pesticides had to be applied. At that time, the major pesticides used were neurotoxins. I wondered if the widespread use of these might present a public health problem. My hypothesis was that persistent exposure to neurotoxins may cause diminished learning in school age children.
This problem, by law, could not be addressed in the United States. I was subsequently granted a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Slovenia to learn how to lower costs for point of use diagnostics to pesticide exposure. The simplified test was based on silica-anchored acetylcholine esterase in flow injection analysis. It may be possible to develop such technology into point of use test strip. Hopefully, by now, this has been developed. Tests of the learning disability hypothesis may have been done by now. I note that pesticides are changing to those based on natural products.
I left Slovenia in early summer and traveled by train to the French Alpes to do some bicycling recreation before returning to the United States. I met someone on the train that worked for the United Nations. She was a pharmacist that worked at field hospitals in countries that had civil war and other social disasters. She informed me that one of the biggest problems they faced was quality control of the pharmaceuticals they received. The drugs would come from all over the world and were varied in their efficacy. Here too, point of use field portable analysis would improve global public health.
I wish I had several lifetimes to live. But I am happy to report that progress is being made in this area of analytical chemistry. Several articles recently accepted for publication in Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry have addressed the development and application litmus paper like tests. Granted the chemistry is much more sophisticated than the old litmus tests. Yet the philosophy is the same. The impact on environmental quality and public health is enhanced by inexpensive, stable and easy to use point diagnostics. I am optimistic that the future of environmental public health will be a better one.
Editor in Chief, Critical Reviews in Analytical Chemistry
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