29 January 2022 | New Scientist | 45killer worldwide,” he says. “It has been for
decades – it kills more than infectious diseases,
more than violence, more than war, more than
tobacco – so we need to address it, there’s just
no excuse. It’s almost accepted, but I find it
absolutely mind-boggling.”
A general pledge to tackle the problem at
source, as the EU made in its zero pollution
action plan, published in May 2021, is one way
forward. But we need far better information
about what is already out there. Since 1950,
hundreds of thousands of new chemicals and
pesticides have been synthesised, for example.
For most, we have no knowledge of their health
effects. “We need to measure more, we need
to monitor more, because what doesn’t get
measured doesn’t get addressed,” says Franco.
“One of the big keys for this field is to move
away from trying to understand individual
elements in isolation to really understand
them as lifetime exposure,” says Bennett. That
means finding out far more about the effects
on us of the chemicals found in the products
and the building materials that we use, the
industrial pollutants in the air that we breathe,
the pesticides and other agricultural chemicals
that may find their way into our water and our
food, and the cosmetics and the sunscreens
that we put on our skin – as well as the
influence of lifestyle factors such as diet,
smoking, vaping and stress.A joined-up view
Since Wild issued his call to arms in 2005, we
have made significant progress towards a more
comprehensive view of what we are exposed
to. According to Roel Vermeulen, an exposome
scientist at Utrecht University in the
Netherlands and chair of the European Human
Exposome Network (EHEN), we already know
the identity of roughly 50 per cent of the
environmental risks we face. In other words,
the glass is now half full, and filling fast. In
the next 10 years, we should be able to get
that number to 90 per cent, says Snyder.
“It’s a big data problem, but it’s doable.”
One factor that fuels such confidence is a
battery of new techniques designed to allow
researchers to move beyond studies of short-
term exposures to get a more joined-up view
of an individual’s lifetime exposure. The US
National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences (NIEHS), for example, recently
developed prototype methods for identifying
every one of thousands of compounds in
blood, urine, saliva, water and household
dust. “It is a brand new world,” says Snyder.
“The way we measure things is way beyond“ For most diseases,
exposure to
environmental pollution
plays a far greater
part in mortality risk
than genetics”
>worldwide, and a third of premature deaths,
defined as those of people between the ages
of 30 and 69.
Most of those deaths are down to exposure
to substances we ourselves are allowing to
leak into the environment. That increases
the moral imperative to prevent them, says
Vicente Franco at the European Commission’s
Directorate General for Environment,
which is responsible for setting the European
Union’s environmental policy. “If you take
the global perspective, pollution is the main