Lin Meng-Wei, a doctoral student in the PhD Program in Bioindustrial Technology at National Tsing Hua University, received the SDGs Academic Paper Award. The 7th SDGs Academic Paper Award is organized by the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy (TAISE) and the CTCI Education Foundation (CTCI EF) to promote and encourage universities and enterprises in Taiwan to engage in research and development on sustainable development and related academic and intellectual applications.
The title of the paper is Effect of environment accumulated toxicity on human health, the abstract is as bellow:
Water is one of the most important substances for life. As we know, 70% of the earth’s surface is covered by water; however, 97% of the earth's water is found in the oceans, less than 3% of the earth's water is available fresh water. With the development of society, a large number of industrial, agricultural and domestic waste pour into the water, resulting in water contamination, which leads to less and less available water resources. Most environmental pollutants are known to be indecomposable and accumulating in soil and aquatic environments. Such environmental pollutants may raise ecotoxicological concerns via bioaccumulation, especially since humans are apex predators, toxic pollutants eventually accumulate in human bodies. Nevertheless, most of the current research on water pollution and bioaccumulation have focused on plankton, benthos, fish and so on. There are few studies to assess the effect of sediment pollutants on human health. The pollutants of water accumulated in the river bed sediment. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to assess sediment toxicity on human health, and hope everyone has access to safe and clean drinking water and live in a health environment (SDG 6 &
3). The Ke-ya stream flows along the national science city, Hsinchu Science Park, and areas with high population density in Hsinchu district, the water quality of the Ke-Ya stream is closely associated with the health of local residents. Hence, the Ke-Ya stream was chosen as the sediment sampling site in the current study. Pollutant analysis indicated that the concentration of heavy metals and organic compounds in downstream sediment was higher than that in the others. 1999, Professor Saul-Wood Lin in National Taiwan University also showed that the Cu content of oysters in the Sien-San area was 1000ppm, which was 40 times more than the world average standard. Taken together, Ke-Ya stream have suffered acutely from a wide range of pollutants for a long time. Our results indicated that most the content of each heavy metal and organic pollutant did not exceed the level of, but our finding shown that there was a risk of harm to human brain, oral, lung, breast, liver, pancreatic, cervical, prostatic, colorectal cell. The adhesive and wound healing ability of cells were also greatly decreased by the presence of downstream sediment compared to other conditions. The cell adhesion and migration are important for cells, loss of those cell essential ability would lead to various diseases. So far, the regulation of sediment pollution is still imperfect, we sincerely hope our studies provide a
scientific basis to adopt strategies for disease prevention and policies for environmental issues. This current study have been published in Ecotoxicology and
Environmental Safety (SCI，IF= 7.129；Q1，Ranking 8/93 in Toxicology) (M.-W. Lin et al., 2022)