Today Senator Merkley (Oregon) released the preliminary results of a study using the MyExposome wristband (funded by the Environmental Defense fund). While not directly part of our Kickstarter, ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/540997591/know-your-personal-chemical-exposure/ ) this use of the basic wristband technology demonstrates the core science is strong. Now the key is to show we can make this available to the general public and enable citizen scientists to gather their own information on environmental exposures.. Or find ways to partner with institutions or researchers or educators....
Anyway... Click to see the full press release or just read this key quote : “The results of this innovative project show that this isn’t a simple case of being a smart consumer and buying the right products,” said Merkley. “Every wristband showed exposure to toxic chemicals that could have drastic effects on the health of Americans, especially our children. It’s clear from this experiment that we need to take action on every level, in Congress and in our states.”
Today MyExposome announced the launch of their Kickstarter project to let individuals monitor their chemical exposure by simply wearing a silicone wristband. MyExposome has designed a new patent-pending technology, originally developed at Oregon State University, which answers critical questions about the chemicals in an individual’s environment. MyExposome KickStarter will provide light-weight non-intrusive wristbands that track individual exposure to chemicals in your daily life.
The monitors are surprisingly simple: silicone wristbands, such as the ones worn in support of various causes, are specially prepared to act as a sponge to absorb hundreds of different chemicals in our environment—the air, water, and even personal care products. The Kickstarter team will then uses multi-million dollar state-of–the-art technology to analyze each wristband to determine exposure to over 1400 chemicals.
“We realized that if we could harness the power of social media to connect with people who really wanted to know what chemicals they were exposed to we could get a big enough group of individuals together to make it economically viable to do all these tests,” says Marc Epstein, CEO, MyExposome. “Right now the scientific community is using this technology to monitor chemical exposure in segmented groups. We wanted to bring this cutting edge technology to the individual—to make the invisible visible. We hope that this Kickstarter campaign will help people have the information needed to take charge of their own environment.”
Researchers track daily exposure to chemicals: KGW news from Portland, OR began coverage of a project where one of their news reporters will be wearing a MyExposome wristband for one week and reporting on the results. They interview Dr. Kim Anderson at her Oregon State University office for an overview of the wristband technology and the need to gather more information on peoples exposure to chemicals. This coverage is generated by a partnership between MyExposome and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF.ORG).
Success in mapping the human genome has fostered the complementary concept of the "exposome". The exposome can be defined as the measure of all the exposures of an individual in a lifetime and how those exposures relate to health. An individual’s exposure begins before birth and includes insults from environmental and occupational sources. Understanding how exposures from our environment, diet, lifestyle, etc. interact with our own unique characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics impact our health is how the exposome will be articulated.
As the environmental health science field strives to better understand the complexity of personal chemical exposures, NIEHS-funded researchers at the Oregon State University (OSU) Superfund Research Program (SRP) led by Kim Anderson, Ph.D., have developed a simple wristband and extraction method that can test exposure to 1,200 chemicals.
Wristbands are the accessory of choice for people promoting a cause. And the next wave of wrist wear might act as a fashionable archive of your chemical exposure.
Active-sampling approaches are commonly used for personal monitoring, but are limited by energy usage and data that may not represent an individual’s exposure or bioavailable concentrations. Current passive techniques often involve extensive preparation, or are developed for only a small number of targeted compounds. In this work, we present a novel application for measuring bioavailable exposure with silicone wristbands as personal passive samplers. Laboratory methodology affecting pre-cleaning, infusion, and extraction were developed from commercially available silicone, and chromatographic background interference was reduced after solvent cleanup with good extraction efficiency (>96%). After finalizing laboratory methods, 49 compounds were sequestered during an ambient deployment which encompassed a diverse set of compounds including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), consumer products, personal care products, pesticides, phthalates, and other industrial compounds ranging in log Kow from -0.07 (caffeine) to 9.49 (tris(2-ethylhexyl) phosphate). In two hot asphalt occupational settings, silicone personal samplers sequestered 25 PAHs during 8- and 40-hour exposures, as well as 2 oxygenated-PAHs (benzofluorenone and fluorenone) suggesting temporal sensitivity over a single work day or week (p<0.05, power = 0.85). Additionally, the amount of PAH sequestered differed between worksites (p<0.05, power = 0.99), suggesting spatial sensitivity using this novel application.
All of the things we’re exposed to, taken together, make up what’s called the “exposome.” In this podcast, we learn how studying the exposome helps scientists take a holistic look at how environmental exposures can keep us healthy—or make us sick.