Exposomics for Better Environmental Health, Pg6

• Key Highlights:

• Context: The article discusses the emerging field of exposomics, which involves studying the totality of environmental exposures (chemical, physical, biological) that an individual experiences throughout their life and how these exposures interact with genetics, diet, and lifestyle to impact health.

• India bears ~25% of the global environmental disease burden, with nearly 3 million deaths annually linked to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks.

• WHO’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2021 attributes 12.8 million global deaths to OEH risks, mainly from ambient PM2.5 and household air pollution.

• Many chemical, physical, and biological hazards, like microplastics and noise, are excluded from current health risk estimates.

• The exposome is a new concept that examines all lifetime environmental exposures and their interaction with genetics, diet, and lifestyle.

• Tools include wearable sensors, biomonitoring, organs-on-chip, and AI-driven analysis.

• Climate change acts as a multiplier for environmental risks, worsening health impacts and food security.

Detailed Insights:

• Current disease burden estimates are conservative undercounts, focusing on limited risk categories due to insufficient exposure data.

• Interactions between environmental, metabolic, behavioural, and genetic factors complicate the identification of root causes of diseases.

• The exposomics approach offers a holistic disease prevention framework, capturing real-life complexity through large-scale, longitudinal data.

• It supports precision public health and can inform environmental health policy, especially in resource-constrained countries like India.

• India needs long-term investment in digital infrastructure, real-time monitoring, and data repositories for exposome research.

Scientific/Technical Concepts Involved:

• Exposome: Total of all environmental exposures in an individual’s lifetime and their effects on health.

• EWAS (Exposure-Wide Association Studies): Analytical studies linking wide exposure data to disease outcomes.

• Organs-on-Chip: Micro-physiological systems simulating human organs to study biological responses to environmental stimuli.

• DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years): A metric combining years of life lost and years lived with disability due to disease.

Mains Mock Question:

What is the significance of exposomics in advancing environmental health research? Critically examine its relevance and feasibility for India’s public health policy.