"Sewage forensics" or "sewer epidemiology" - monitoring drug levels in sewage to gauge usage

What is it about?

This book chapter is the seminal article that conceptualized the first analytical tool for quickly estimating community-wide usage rates of illicit drugs by monitoring sewage. Informally called "sewage forensics" or "sewer epidemiology" by others, it was eventually formally named FEUDS: "Forensic Epidemiology Using Drugs in Sewage" (doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-7615-4_3).

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Why is it important?

FEUDS has become an area of concerted research and evaluation by researchers and drug-surveillance agencies worldwide. It later facilitated the author to propose the broader concept of Sewage Chemical Information Mining (SCIM) - with initial applications of real-time estimation of human population size (doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.11.015) and gauging the status of collective public health at the local level (doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2012.02.038).