Chemistry, Public Health, and You

Core Concepts

In this article, we’ll conclude our mini-series by exploring where public health is going and how chemistry will take it there. We will revisit central themes about science and medicine from a public health perspective, emphasizing the countless ways they interrelate with one another to impact our well-being.

This is the eighth article in a special ChemTalk mini-series about the intersections between chemistry and public health, using COVID-19 as a case study. Across this series, you can expect to learn about the drug discovery and development processes, chemistry’s central role in diagnosing and preventing diseases, and careers that are on the front line of chemistry and public health.

Previous Articles in This Mini-Series

> The Chemistry Behind Coronaviruses
> The Drug Discovery Process
> The Drug Development Process
> Chemistry Careers in the Public Health Field
> The Biochemistry Behind COVID-19 Medications
> The Disease Detective Work of Lab Diagnostics
> Scientific Strategies for Disease Prevention

What brings you here? Perhaps it’s an aching curiosity for the mysteries of modern medicine and the unconditional search for their answers. A passion for people: serving them, helping them, improving their lives, helping them improve their own lives. A vision you can’t shake of your future self, tinkering away in a laboratory like an ancient alchemist, crafting the household-name therapeutics of tomorrow. Maybe even a mixture of the three.

We use science and health to accomplish all of these things. Thanks to them, we don’t simply exist in our environment; we can utilize it to our advantage. We can foster our well-being — through medicine, nutrition, therapeutics, and more — by using the principles of nature and the science that underlies them. In doing so, we gain a greater understanding of ourselves and our health needs, priorities, and goals.

As we walk this journey, we’ll focus on the relationship between chemistry and public health by covering examples of the connections between them. As we do, bear in mind that the broader fields of science and health overlap by many other means. They inform each other, influence each other, inspire each other — and us. In recent years, we’ve emerged stronger than ever from health emergencies like COVID-19. That’s largely due to chemistry’s role in the strategies that ultimately stop them. By supporting, fueling, and guiding public health, we’re empowered to adapt to healthy ways of life in our environment.

In this article, we’ll explore what that power looks like and where it comes from. First, let’s consider why public health and chemistry are key forces in our lives, and how they interact to help us pursue our healthiest selves.

Why does public health matter?

With the rise and fall of COVID-19, we’ve all become hyperaware of our health. Maybe that’s because we’ve witnessed the consequences that can happen when it gets compromised. Or, perhaps it’s because we’ve seen that good health can mean the difference between the freedom to go out and experience the world, versus being asked to mask up and self-isolate. The truth is, public health has always been relevant to us. It’s just that a lot of the work that goes into keeping us healthy happens behind the scenes, until a major event (like a pandemic) suddenly sheds light on them.

The purpose of public health is to bring our largest health goals within reach. By minimizing health threats and maximizing health resources, robust public health initiatives contribute to an increased quality of life for everyone. It’s up to individuals to maintain healthy habits like nutrition and exercise, but it’s up to public health professionals to build a healthy society. These are the folks who facilitate those habits: reducing barriers to medical care, empowering people to take ownership of their health journey, and educating the public about issues that affect their health.

As its name implies, public health affects all of us. It touches all dimensions, big and small, of our lives and lifestyles. Day-to-day, public health is how we advocate for our wellness and steer ourselves in the direction of healthy behaviors. More broadly, it connects us with healthcare services, manages complicated health crises, and creates distance between us and harmful diseases.

An inherently interdisciplinary field, public health can’t do this alone. It craves and counts on the support of science to navigate these complex goals. We’ll discuss this in more detail soon. For now, you should know one crucial point: science is a tool for improving health, and public health provides the channels necessary to put those tools to good use. To achieve our best possible health outcomes as a collective society, we need both of them, working in harmony.

Welcome to the intersection between science and public health. What brings us here? An authentic ambition to better the world through both. A fascination with how far we can go, and an unquestionable quest to go farther than we ever have. What keeps us here — all of us — is the drive to do more.

Why does chemistry matter?

The fields of science and health are close cousins: inextricable, even. They built one another and continue to grow side-by-side, influencing each other all the while. As we’ll see, science and health cross paths in many places. However, we’ll spend this article focusing on the relationship between one particular area of science (chemistry) and one of health (public health).

Chemistry is more than just the study of matter and its interactions. It’s a mission in meaning-making. It involves making sense of the smallest parts of our world, investigating how they function, and discovering how they help us function. By taking the time to understand the world around us on a deep level, we have a special opportunity to understand ourselves on a deeper level.

We may not always think about it, but chemistry has a remarkable, deep-rooted impact on our health. It brings us the vaccines we use to keep from getting sick, and the medications we take to feel better. We depend on chemistry to manage pollution and purify our water supply, to cook nutritious food and digest it smoothly, to deliver life-saving surgeries and other medical interventions. Chemistry’s heroism took center stage during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it’s behind all of the strategies that led us to medical, social, and economic recovery.

And it was part of the solution from the very beginning. From the first moment you develop symptoms and take a diagnostic test, chemistry is hard at work. It gives you more than just rapid, accurate results. It also brings closure to your uncertainty and delivers the answers you need to plan your next steps. From there, if you’re infected, you might seek support from a health care provider. Their job, of course, is to make sense of your symptoms and give you what you need most: relief.

To do this, they lean on their scientific knowledge and perhaps even pharmaceutical drugs to help you feel better fast. And how could those drugs have come to be without the essential role of chemistry? Diseases manifest in many different ways, so our arsenal of medications must be well-suited to address each and every one. COVID-19, specifically, birthed a number of antivirals that only exist as a result of the sensational science underlying them. We use chemistry in big and small ways here, and in combination with other fields like biology and genetics. They all collaborate to identify promising new treatment options, brainstorm drug targets that bring a disease to its knees, and pinpoint the perfect dosage to provide relief.

We wouldn’t be who we are without this elegant, enchanting field of science. Chemistry tells us about the fundamental building blocks of our physical world, but it’s fundamental to our public health approaches, too. The pandemic is an exceptional example of this, but it doesn’t stop there. Let’s look closer at how they intertwine to help make us the healthiest versions of ourselves.

How does chemistry shape public health?

It’s no secret that chemistry — atoms, molecules, and the stirring dances between them — forms the building blocks of our world. Somehow, it starts from nothing and forges everything: from the boundless skies, to the bottomless seas below them, to the most minuscule specks of matter throughout.

But, as we’ve alluded to, chemistry doesn’t just shape our world physically. It also shapes our world in terms of how we live within it. Something powerful happens when chemistry joins forces with public health, in particular. Scientific knowledge reinforces our public health outcomes with research and policies that are based on evidence and experience. This ensures that our public health goals reflect and fulfill our population’s needs, and our public health initiatives stay true to who we are.

Public health’s objective of helping people live their healthiest lives is a massive undertaking. But chemistry is up for the challenge. In this section, we’ll uncover the ways chemistry has brought us closer to fulfilling that mission. In the process, we’ll also uncover what that means for you.

Using Chemistry to Make the Most of Medicine

Modern healthcare is advancing so quickly that it’s almost unrecognizable from the medical practices emphasized centuries or decades ago. Many of those advances are deeply embedded in science, featuring chemistry front and center. They help us overcome and prevent disease, remedy genetic conditions at their core, and customize care to patients’ unique needs. Without chemistry, medical progress moves at a crawl; with it, at breakneck speed. Let’s weigh a few areas of healthcare that place chemistry in the spotlight and examine why they work wonders.

Here for a Good Time and a Long Time

On those occasional lousy days when we wake up under the weather and find ourselves wandering the pharmacy aisles in search of the fastest-acting cure-all, we expect it to work! That’s a simple request, but we need a lot of factors to make it happen. In our bodies, a worthwhile drug product must undergo the reactions it needs to undergo, and steer clear of the ones it shouldn’t. It has to stick around just long enough to do its job effectively, alleviating our symptoms or addressing the cause of our ailment, and then promptly leave our system. If a drug lingers longer than it should, its effects (both positive and negative) might last longer, too. Drug molecules could continue to participate in chemical reactions or interact with other substances in the body, creating safety risks.

Other times, longevity is exactly what we’re looking for in a medication. During the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, for example, public health teams were tasked with distributing doses across the world. Though they did this as quickly as possible, the integrity of the doses had to be maintained during the entire journey. The vaccines’ chemical composition, along with cold storage temperatures in many cases, helped keep their stability intact. A drug with high stability will sustain consistent levels of purity, potency and quality throughout its shelf life. That means it’s easier for scientists to reliably predict how well the vaccine or medication will work over time. After all that hard work of making the drug, the last thing we want (especially during an unstable pandemic that’s begging for a silver-bullet vaccine) is for those therapeutics to degrade before they reach the patient.

In this sense, chemistry is the pulse that keeps the pharmaceutical industry alive and well. Using this sensational science, we can conceptualize, design, and make medical therapies that balance effectiveness with patient safety. We need to know in advance how a drug’s molecules will act when they encounter other kinds of molecules in the body. That begins with a clear, detailed understanding of general and organic chemistry, like functional groups and bonding behavior.

The pharmaceutical process employs chemistry from start to finish, from formulation to delivery — and even beyond. For instance, biomedical researchers and healthcare practitioners care about how our bodies metabolize drugs, a notion revolving around chemistry. Metabolism matters because it breaks down the drug into its useful form and it prevents a toxic dose from building up in the body. This breakdown is essentially a series of chemical reactions, so scientists need to take chemistry into account during drug design.

The medication, without chemistry’s involvement, is just a pill, just a capsule, just an injection. Chemistry is what makes that humble medication into a transformative medicine. When the drug finally reaches the patient, then chemistry gets yet another opportunity to shine: in healthcare. Let’s see how these two fields are building upon one another to make each other, and our health, better.

Snip, Snip! Chemistry and Genetic Treatments

Science is great when it helps us treat disease, a central goal of public health. In light of contemporary medical discoveries, we can expand upon that ability and prevent disease in the first place.

One of the most notable recent developments in genetic editing is the CRISPR-Cas9 system. This modern scientific marvel is quite complex, but in essence, it’s a genomic find-and-replace feature. A sequence of guide RNA (gRNA) binds to and directs the Cas9 endonuclease to a precise region of DNA — not one base pair farther. Which particular region depends on a gene of interest’s location. Cas9 makes itself at home here, cleaving the DNA strands at this spot like a pair of meticulous molecular scissors. Now wide open, the DNA strands are accessible for editing that gene.

If the gene is responsible for causing a genetic disorder, the next step in this process might be silencing the gene (turning it off) or modifying its nucleotide sequence to represent the healthy version of the gene. Scientists might even insert an entirely new gene at this location. The objective is to disrupt the faulty gene’s function, repair errors in its sequence, or replace it with a healthier one.

Why does CRISPR-Cas9 work better than other gene editing techniques? It’s easy to get lost in a DNA molecule’s endless string of base pairs, but CRISPR-Cas9 has a high level of specificity. This is because the gRNA’s 20-nucleotide-long sequence identifies the exact location on the DNA molecule where Cas9 needs to snip. As a result, this is one form of gene therapy with a lot of control. There’s low risk of off-target cleavage (which could cause unwanted mutations and put the treatment’s safety at risk). We can devote our attention to fixing genetic errors at their source, providing promise for treating chronic conditions like cancer, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, and others.

CRISPR-Cas9’s groundbreaking specificity leads us into a larger discussion about how chemistry’s pinpoint accuracy is changing patients’ lives for the better. Other up-and-coming biomedical research areas lean heavily on chemical functions and mechanisms. Let’s investigate one of them in more depth.

Patient-Centered Care: Precision Medicine

When you’re ill or injured, you deserve a health treatment that’s designed with you in mind. (The patient, after all, is the whole reason why the treatment exists!) A medical approach called precision medicine aims to do just that, and it leans heavily on chemistry as its blueprint.

Public health often focuses on population-scale health issues. That big-picture mindset is a firm foundation for collaboration and effective decision-making, but it minimizes the smaller-scope impacts of healthcare. This is where chemistry truly makes a difference. By applying chemistry to clinical medicine, we can carve new avenues for patient care that tailor our health initiatives to individuals’ well-being, rather than addressing population-level problems.

Precision medicine actively customizes treatments and therapies to patients. But wait — doesn’t all medicine aim to do this? Not necessarily. Any physician wants the best health outcomes for their patients, but two patients with the same condition might respond very differently to the same treatment. Sometimes that’s due to rigid factors like their age, biological sex, or comorbid medical conditions. Other times, that difference derives from biochemical factors like genetic variations or how fast the patient metabolizes drugs. Health care providers can’t change a patient’s age, for instance, but they can use chemistry’s innate agility to manipulate those biochemical processes so as to make the treatment more meaningful. Because diseases (and their drug treatments) often have molecular and physiological underpinnings, chemistry is well-equipped to tackle them directly. Even better, tapping into chemistry here lets scientists predict a patient’s response to therapies or gauge the risk of negative health outcomes.

For example, drug metabolism happens when enzymes in the body bind to the drug and break it down into an easily-excretable form. Some folks have polymorphisms in their DNA that affect how these enzymes function. A person’s genes might overproduce the enzyme, so their body metabolizes the drug faster than it should, and a higher dose is needed to obtain the desired effect. Contrarily, their DNA may generate defective forms of the enzyme that, in their flawed state, don’t react with the drug as expected. A defect in the enzyme’s active site (where the enzyme normally binds to the drug) might inhibit that binding and, therefore, slow the metabolism process. A normal dose of the drug might accumulate to toxic levels in these patients’ bodies, so their health care provider should prescribe a lower dose.

Drug metabolism is only one scenario demonstrating how chemistry contributes to our personalized picture of health. Chemistry also influences other areas in precision medicine, with huge implications on public health. To name a few examples, we can interpret the genetic sequence of a patient’s tumor and apply those findings to design therapies which target mutations in that specific tumor. We can use chemistry-inspired diagnostic tests and microbial profiling techniques to definitively diagnose a patient’s disease and the pathogen behind it, which saves time with more efficient treatment. The science of fitness trackers, like wristwatches and rings, delivers individualized insights for anyone to monitor their own wellness. Even laypeople can develop health literacy and take their well-being into their own hands.

When it comes to your own medical treatment, you matter most. Combining precision medicine with a chemical perspective, we can map out individualized health plans for people. That introduces new solutions as well as long-term, life-changing benefits for patients who otherwise may have limited options. The interventions that providers can offer now are more varied than ever before, which is critical as they strive to adapt to the evolving needs of a diverse patient population.

With chemistry’s help, each of our medicinal therapeutics becomes an easier pill to swallow. Later on, we’ll talk more about how chemical concepts translate to other realms of medicine, like healthcare. On our way there, let’s pause to discuss the part chemistry plays in our nutrition, energy, and microbiome.

Food for Thought: How Chemistry Fuels Us

It’s hard to sit through a long chemistry lecture without daydreaming of your next meal. And when it comes to science’s impact on our food, chemistry takes the cake! It’s vital to keeping our food supply nutrient-rich and safe for consumption, and keeping our digestion working optimally. By extension, it’s vital to keeping us healthy.

Chemistry lies at the heart of how food works and how we think about it. For example, we conceptualize the energy in a piece of food in terms of calories. (One calorie indicates the amount of heat needed to increase a gram of water’s temperature by 1°C.) We heat-treat some foods, especially dairy products, using pasteurization to reduce the risk of microbial contamination and preserve food safety. Food is fuel for us, and chemical reactions form the basis of that fuel.

It’s easy to overlook, or take for granted entirely, the benefits of a nutritious diet. These benefits extend beyond just your physical wellness. A healthy diet can strengthen your mental health, sleep quality, immune function, and overall development. If nutrition is one of the foundations of our well-being, then chemistry is the foundation of nutrition. To see that in action, let’s cover a few case studies showing chemistry’s lead role in our food supply, both before and after we’ve eaten.

Pesticides: Pros and Cons

Food crosses our mind several times a day, but we might not think often about how that food reaches us. Agriculture, and its sister field aquaculture, are brimming with thoughtfully-devised practices that ensure our land- and sea-derived food sources have acceptable safety and quality. These practices, including the use of chemical substances, are enforced by regulatory authorities, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States.

Chemicals have a place in modern agriculture, as we use pesticides and fertilizers to help our crops thrive. Pests can damage a crop, or consume it before we get to, so pesticides are one way to manage them and keep our crops intact. Certain chemicals used in pesticides can be toxic to humans, though, at least at certain levels of exposure. Therefore, their usage is tightly regulated on the farm, ensuring produce that reaches the grocery store is safe for eating. When used properly, pesticides keep our crops intact for longer, protecting our food security.

But when these regulations aren’t enforced, it has repercussions on our health. One notable example is the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. We can’t say that three times fast, so it’s better known as DDT. Originally, DDT was a popular choice for insect control, not only on commercial farms, but even among households. Some time later, environmental scientists found that DDT has the potential to harm much more than the local insect population. It can remain in soil for decades and spread to bodies of water, killing the fish that reside there. It also poses a risk to the predator animals, particularly birds, which feed on insects that died from DDT. Even so, the minority of insects that survive DDT might develop resistance to it, making them significantly harder to eradicate.

As for humans — the very group that should have benefited most from DDT — we now know that DDT is toxic to us, too. It interferes with our endocrine system, bioaccumulates (builds up in our bodies over time), and is suspected of causing cancer. Fortunately, regulatory authorities have banned the use of DDT in many countries, including the U.S. However, it has a compelling purpose as a mosquito deterrent, so it remains in use in some places where malaria is widespread.

From a public health perspective, this is a big ethical dilemma: Is spraying mosquito breeding grounds with DDT justified, knowing that the DDT might damage the surrounding environment? It’s a difficult call to make. We do have other antimalarial tools, like preventive medications and insecticidal barrier nets, but they’re less effective than DDT when it comes to killing mosquitoes. Additionally, we have other methods of increasing crop yields and reducing the need for pesticides: for example, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that are well-equipped for survival under harsh growth conditions. What we also have is a scientific understanding of pesticides’ impacts (good and bad) on the environment and our health. Public health is responsible for using that scientific knowledge to make decisions about our health, but it doesn’t address decisions about the environment.

It’s important to distinguish between the ways our environment affects our health (which is environmental health’s jurisdiction), and the ways our public health decisions (like the choice to use DDT on crops) might affect our environment. Soon, we’ll talk a bit more about chemistry’s role in our environmental health. Before we continue to that section, let’s first finish our discussion on chemistry’s role in our food supply.

The Marvelous Microbiome

When you eat, you’re not just eating for yourself. You’re also eating for the trillions (yes, with a T) of industrious microorganisms that inhabit your digestive tract!

A community of microbes like bacteria, viruses, and fungi reside all over our bodies: the skin, respiratory system, and elsewhere. All together, this community is called the microbiome. The microbiome is most diverse and plentiful in our digestive system, especially the intestines. They break down our food, produce nutrients, regulate our immunity, and much more. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of how these microbes contribute to our health and coexist with us. This is a rising area of research, and chemistry lies at the core of it.

Our digestion is at its healthiest when our gut microbiome is balanced, diverse, and well-nourished. Everyone’s microbiome is unique; to an extent, it depends on our genetic makeup. But much of it is derived from the foods we eat and the lifestyles we have. A fiber-rich, plant-based diet and regular exercise — healthy habits long promoted by public health initiatives — provide a strong foundation for a hardy gut microbiome. In fact, the composition of one’s microbiome (the microbial species present in it) can somewhat indicate their likelihood of disease. An imbalanced microbiome (dysbiosis) is implicated as a risk factor for conditions like cancer, diabetes, and even autoimmune conditions.

So what does chemistry have to do with the gut microbiome? This tireless team of tiny bugs are responsible for many of the chemical reactions that keep us running smoothly. Through anaerobic metabolism, they use enzymes to break down nutrients and produce energy from our food, for instance. And although their effort usually goes unnoticed, it doesn’t happen quietly. In the course of their diligent work, they constantly communicate with each other via intercellular signals like peptides and proteins. These signals regulate our metabolism and biochemical pathways associated with digestion.

A biomedical wonder, the gut microbiome flourishes when we eat a well-rounded diet of nutrient-dense foods. Think of your microbiome as an ecosystem, a well-orchestrated network of many diverse species, each with its own role to play. The ecosystem thrives when each is present and active, so they can all play those respective roles. Those roles involve using chemical processes to extract energy and nutrients, fend off harmful pathogens, and uphold our health.

Thinking about the ecosystems within us, and how they keep us healthy by adapting to our food choices, is fascinating. But what about the ecosystems around us? Our external environments have a similarly large impact on our health. Let’s explore how chemistry underlies that key relationship between our environment and our health — just as it underlies everything.

Chemistry All around Us

Take a moment to ponder how crucial our environment is to our survival. We wouldn’t be able to function without using its resources, like food and water (to keep us alive), energy sources (to sustain our lifestyles and standards of living), and raw materials (to help us make everything from the shirt on your back to the device you’re reading this article on). However, it’s also crucial to our health! Since we spend so much time in, and actively using, our environment, it’s no surprise that our environmental conditions can influence our well-being. No doubt about it — where, and the ways in which, we live often directly affect our wellness.

Earlier, we mentioned that a field called environmental health deals with how our environment affects our health. This field is a proud branch on the tree of public health. This portion of the article will focus on how our environments impact our well-being, and chemistry as the origin of some of that impact. Without further ado, let’s dive in to our discussion. We’ll emphasize applications of how we can manipulate chemistry in the natural world to leverage limitless benefits on our health. Along the way, we’ll relate those scenarios back to how we manipulated our environment to manage COVID-19.

Water You Waiting For?

There’s nothing quite as alluring as a glass of cool, crisp water on a hot summer day. In more ways than one, science makes the unrivaled satisfaction of this sensation possible for us to enjoy. Due to chemistry’s helping hand, we can keep our water supply — and ourselves — safe from health threats that naturally lurk there.

Water is so vital to our very existence that we can’t picture our lives without it. Contaminated water supplies greatly limit us in terms of the things we can do and the extent of our health. Luckily, we can trust our water sources not to get us sick if they’ve been chemically treated. Treating water before it reaches us ensures that it’s of good enough quality for us to use, consume, and benefit from.

Why does preserving water quality matter? We use water for just about everything! And for any application (cooking our favorite comfort food, sustainably fueling our power supply, a therapeutic sprint of spring cleaning) we want our water to be free of pollution. Depending on the intended use, we might also seek a specific pH value, salinity level, or mineral content in it. We need water for everything, so it should support our health — and good water quality smooths and shortens the path toward good health. Let’s examine a couple of notable examples.

Monitoring and managing our water supply allows us to remediate water quality issues and, in the process, reinforce public health. Using chemical techniques, we can purify water before it reaches our homes and institutions, and control waterborne diseases. We can add essential minerals to our drinking water, substances that our body needs to carry out its functions — calcium and potassium, to drop some names. Fortifying our water supply with fluoride, a familiar public health initiative, is associated with better dental health and reduced tooth decay.

Testing the Waters (Literally)

Chemistry is an industrious science: it’s hard at work on all scales, from tiny test tubes to the open ocean. For example, we’ve witnessed how it operates on a molecular scope to fight viral particles head-on inside the body. Then, we widened our lens to consider how it guides our decision-making and response on a global level during a worldwide disease outbreak. The impact of chemistry on our health is undeniable, but some of its biggest public health impacts lie beneath the surface.

Think back to the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. No vaccines, no diagnostic tests, and absolutely no travel. Video calls, scrub-till-you’re-red showers, and whatever the heck “unprecedented times” is supposed to mean. Re-watching your favorite show so often you begin to hate it, because what else are you supposed to do while confined to your house for two weeks? However, amid all of this mayhem and monotony, there was also deep-seated fear and confusion. As all of us — public health officials and the general population — did our best to contain an unwavering virus, we kept returning to a few core questions. How do we contain a virus that spreads so fast? So unrelentingly? And sometimes asymptomatically?

Without diagnostic tests widely available, we needed another way to determine where and how much the disease was spreading. So we turned to chemistry, of course! Throughout the pandemic, public health workers performed wastewater surveillance to measure local levels of COVID-19. Wastewater surveillance involves testing a community’s water for the presence of a pathogen, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This technique helps public health professionals like epidemiologists determine how widespread an outbreak is, and track where it’s spreading.

SARS-CoV-2 is a surprisingly sneaky bug. We know that from its countless mutations, its tendency to elude vaccines, and its ability to spread surreptitiously. Not all COVID-19 infections present symptoms, which can pose a major challenge to public health teams trying to track them. Luckily, though, we’ve had ways of monitoring them even before COVID-19 diagnostic tests became widely available. Measuring the amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater samples helps epidemiologists estimate how many people contributing to that wastewater have COVID-19.

Wastewater comes, in part, from household plumbing like toilets. Because infected people shed SARS-CoV-2 particles in their waste, and that waste travels through plumbing to the local wastewater supply, an infected person’s wastewater will have some amount of SARS-CoV-2 in it. Viral levels within a community’s shared wastewater supply will reflect roughly how prevalently the disease is spreading within that community. If adjacent communities with separate wastewater supplies have the virus present, then this suggests that the disease is spreading between them. Epidemiologists can then assess other factors — compare how many days or weeks passed before the second community’s wastewater gained detectable viral levels, for instance — to draw conclusions about how fast the spread is happening.

Since COVID-19 infections can be asymptomatic, wastewater surveillance (along with diagnostic testing) is a reliable indicator of the true viral spread within a local area, even when its residents aren’t showing symptoms. This practice came in handy when quantifying COVID-19 spread across cities, college campuses, and other concentrated communities. We can do wastewater surveillance to estimate the infection rates of other diseases, too, but it only works for detecting pathogens that are shed in human waste. If the pathogen’s host doesn’t shed it in their waste, then searching for the pathogen in their wastewater is a fool’s errand. In those situations, a diagnostic test may be the only way to approximate infection rates.

Chemistry has a breadth of environmental applications besides water quality, of course. We can use it to monitor and address air pollution, even detecting trace amounts of contaminants. We can also utilize lab-based analytical techniques that produce chemical findings about our environment. Public health officials then incorporate these chemical findings into their programs and interventions. They might respond to high environmental lead quantities, for instance, by replacing lead pipes with copper or stainless steel ones. That’s the strength of chemistry! Through its techniques, we can reduce our exposure to toxins and remediate the environment when necessary. Chemistry gives us profound insights into our environment’s effects on our health — and, more importantly, chemistry does something about it.

The ways our environment affects our well-being cannot be overstated. When our surroundings are healthy, so are we. Chemistry bridges that relationship by introducing tools and techniques that help us detect, alleviate, and prevent pollution. It’s the cornerstone of a clean, toxin-free environment, and thus, of public health. So how else can we leverage science for the power of good? How will we use the might of chemistry to maximize our positive health outcomes in the years to come? Let’s sneak a peek into some inspiring advances in the public health field that simply wouldn’t be complete without chemistry.

Science Takes Us Further

We’ve just examined a number of case studies where chemistry shines as a health application. As time goes on, its impact is only growing in scope and scale. The COVID-19 pandemic was a true test of how effectively we can harness chemistry to keep us well — and we passed!

But we can’t stop there. Somewhere beyond the current boundaries of public health are more solutions to discover, more answers we haven’t identified yet. To find them, we’re mobilizing the biochemical experience we gained from the pandemic and redirecting the healthcare field accordingly. Our future medical strategies will build upon our knowledge of chemistry and public health to create durable, high-quality health outcomes for everyone. Let’s learn more.

Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone Before

COVID-19 reshaped our relationship with disease: how we think about it, how we approach it, and how we manage it. From that experience, we’ve learned how to use chemistry to stay adaptable and resilient when facing an unrelenting pathogen. This outlook will guide our future directions of public health, while emphasizing science’s starring role in getting us there. Think of all the possibilities! Universal vaccines that could prevent many strains of a pathogen, stopping mutation-happy bugs in their tracks. New treatments for antimicrobial resistance (a stubborn health threat that could cause more deaths than cancer by 2050), ensuring that we’ll always come out on top. Green chemistry techniques that could protect the environment’s health as well as ours, by helping us overcome toxins and monitor disease spread across vast regions.

So why should we care about all of this? Our scientific knowledge shapes policy decisions, which shape the way we live. In health policy, those decisions have a personal impact on our health and how we navigate it. Fortunately, we also have an impact on science and public health. We make choices like how to interpret scientific research, what to do with that information, and how to use it to address issues that affect everybody’s well-being: health disparities stemming from sociopolitical factors, the elusive obstacle of health misinformation, structural effects of our healthcare system and institutions on patient outcomes, and more.

From here on out, public health will never look the same — and it shouldn’t. We’ve learned so much from this experience, including the areas we need to improve upon to make our public health actions more robust. Health crises like COVID-19 can shift quickly, and our readiness to respond to these emerging challenges can make or break our outcomes. But with science by our side, we’re set up for success. Science gives us exactly what we need: paths to preventing, diagnosing, targeting, controlling, and curing ailments that test public health’s resolve. The result? More prepared, attentive public health initiatives that actively prioritize our society’s medical needs.

It’s clear that chemistry and public health don’t just influence each other; they depend on one another. They also depend on us — to use them to bridge gaps in our health issues, to look deeper below their surfaces, and to bring them to life. That begins with brilliant minds like yours. No matter what brought you here, you belong.

Conclusion

The realms of science and health are both full of untapped discoveries. Inspired by the knowledge we’ve learned and the anticipation of what’s next, we continue to identify new applications of chemistry and public health every day. Each of these fields is quite powerful on its own. However, by working together, they enable us to live healthier than ever. Lying somewhere at the intersection of chemistry and public health is a breakthrough waiting to happen. Go out there and find the next one.