Better environmental health through exposomics

• The World Environment Day 2025 focuses on ending plastic pollution, a significant environmental health challenge.

• Micro-plastics are among the many chemical, physical, and biological hazards in air, water, and living spaces that lack sensory capabilities or sensing technologies.

• Rapid economic growth in India is increasing the complexity of environmental exposures and the interdependencies between living environment and lifestyles.

• India accounts for nearly 25% of the global environmental disease burden, necessitating new paradigms for environmental management based on integrated health risk assessments.

• Current framing on environment or health indicators may exaggerate environmental health inequities and result in high health costs.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the environmental disease burden in 2000, which is the basis for the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor (GBD) study.

• In India, nearly three million deaths and 100 million deaths are attributable to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks.

• The current environmental burden of disease only addresses around 11 categories of environmental risk factors due to a lack of human exposure data.

• Environmental risk factors interact in complex ways with metabolic, behavioural, genetic, and upstream health determinants.

• Climate change can magnify hazards posed by multiple environmental risk factors, affecting crop yields, agricultural worker productivity, food security, and food supply chains.

• Current estimates are conservative underestimates and do not provide an adequate means of prioritizing against competing risk factors to develop holistic, scalable preventive health strategies.

The Human Exposome and its Role in Health

The Human Exposome Concept

• The global human genome project (1990-2003) revolutionized understanding of disease genetic origins.

• The project revealed limited predictive power of individual genetic variation for common diseases.

• The exposome is defined as the measure of all exposures an individual has in a lifetime and their relationship to health.

Exposomics

• Exposomics aims to understand how external exposures interact with diet, lifestyle, and individual characteristics to create health or disease.

• It requires synchronization of inter-disciplinary technologies including real-time sensor-based personal exposure monitoring, untargeted chemical analyses, testing on human-relevant micro-physiological systems, big data, and AI.

Mainstream Environment within Health

• Exposomics offers potential to mainstream environmental risks within public health programs.

• It generates more accurate predictive models for many chronic diseases and enables precision medicine.

• Unbridled investments in capacity building and synchronising available infrastructure offer cost-effective solutions to population concerns.

• The Indian environmental health community is urged to contribute to the global momentum on exposomics.