Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health Commons^™

The Nature Of Genes Expressed Differently After Environmental Drug Exposure, Nicci Siffel

Scholars Week

The Nature of Genes Expressed Differently after Environmental Drug Exposure

N. Siffel, S. Anderson, B. Subedi, D.R. Hammond-Weinberger

Drug use, of prescription or illicit varieties, alter bodily functions in different ways, especially in the nervous system. These drugs are found in sources of drinking water because they are not removed by wastewater treatment facilities. To investigate the effects of these drugs as they appear in mixtures, we exposed groups of zebrafish embryos to cocktails of drugs and screened for genes that were differentially expressed between the experimental and control groups and could thus give more insight into their biological functions. …

Consumption Profiles Of Illicit And Neuropsychiatric Drugs In Urban And Rural Communities In Kentucky Using Sewage Epidemiology, Tara Croft, Katelyn Foppe, Rhiannon Huffines, Bikram Subedi

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The drug overdose deaths in the USA increased by ~20% from 2015 to 2016 to the total >63,600 drug overdose deaths in 2016. Kentucky is among the highest rate of drug overdose death states in the USA. The current estimates of the prevalence of substance abuse are based on the self-reported surveys, overdose/toxicological reports, and drug-related crime statistics. Survey-based conventional approaches are not only cost and time-intensive but also underestimate the actual consumption of drugs. As “wastewater never lie,” the drug residues in raw wastewater collected from the centralized wastewater treatment plants were utilized to determine the consumption rate of …