VISION: The strategic vision of the Water & Health Laboratory, part of the Cyprus International Institute for Environmental and Public Health (CII) is two-fold: i) to evaluate health risks associated with chronic exposures to environmental stressors (eg., chemical and physical) with particular focus on the application of novel targeted biomarkers and untargeted metabolomics platforms, and ii) equally important, to test the effectiveness of non-pharmacological health interventions (e.g., organic diet, bio-based food packaging materials, alternative disinfectants and short stays in mountainous climatic conditions) in improving key metabolic health indicators.

WHAT WE DO:

The main pillars of the Water and Health Lab team activities are:

• Designing population health studies and executing them in the field
• Developing and applying novel human biomonitoring for biomarkers of exposure/effect and implementing agnostic metabolomics protocols
• Processing and analyzing population health data
• Communicating and disseminating health risks to the public and policy makers

HOW: The Water and Health Lab research agenda is built upon the framework of the human exposome, i.e., the totality of all environmental exposures occurring in one’s lifetime. The W&H Lab team has recently coined the concept of the urban exposome, i.e., the continuous spatiotemporal surveillance/monitoring of quantitative and qualitative indicators associated with the urban external and internal domains that shape up the quality of life and the health of urban populations, using small city areas, i.e. neighborhoods, quarters, or smaller administrative districts, as the point of reference.

The W&H Lab team holds two unique characteristics: i) being capable of generating its own biomarker data using state of the art instrumentation available in its analytic facilities and ii) in-house processing and analyzing own-generated population health data. The scientific hypotheses are tested generating either observational or experimental human studies that are designed and executed by the Water and Health Lab team along with its strategic partners from CII and from other academic institutions in Europe and in the USA.

The W&H lab was established in 2008 and took its name, because of a strategic focus of the CII on water and health issues that were historically present for the island. However, over the years, it became evident that the environmental determinants of chronic disease may be found in multiple compartments, such as in both drinking-water, and showering water, food, air, dust, or soil, etc. Thus, the comprehensive characterization of environmental exposures towards the improved understanding of the chronic disease process require the integration of all involved sources and pathways in contact with the human being. Oral ingestion of water is not the sole route of exposure to chemical or microbiological stressors that impact human health. For example, inhalation and dermal uptake are important routes of exposure to water contaminants via a suite of common water use activities (i.e. cooking, showering, cleaning, etc).

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