When colds, flus and allergies hit, many people automatically turn to over-the-counter medications to push through and treat their symptoms. These include decongestants, painkillers, cough or allergy medicines and combinations thereof. Nearly 70% of adults in the U.S. use over-the-counter medications as a first-line response for treating cold and flu symptoms. We are a pharmacoepidemiologist and pharmacist team and we investigate adherence to medications and potential harms of medications associated with drug-drug interactions. Pharmacoepidemiology is the study of medication use and treatment outcomes among large populations in real-world settings. A 2021 study showed that from 2017 to 2019 in the U.S., approximately 6.1 of every 1,000 people visited emergency rooms because of harms from medications. Of these emergency room visits, 38.6% led to hospitalization. More of these cases occurred in patients 65 and older than in younger populations. Another study estimated that every year, 26,735 people went to the emergency room for adverse events related to over-the-counter cold and cough medications. And more than 60% used the medications for reasons other than the medication's intended use....
A team of MIT researchers, together with researchers from Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and Kuwait University, has been awarded a $4 million grant for a collaborative research project titled âThe Underworlds Project: a Smart Sewage Infrastructure for Kuwait.â
The Underworlds project is being funded through the Kuwait-MIT Center for Natural Resources and the Environment (CNRE) by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) with a performance period of three years commencing this November.
Underworlds taps into biomarkers embedded in municipal wastewater and sewage networks to leverage spatiotemporal sampling in order to create a real-time public health profile of urban areas. The project then explores a plethora of ideas to identify, track, and monitor infectious diseases; to track antibiotic resistance genes and multi-drug-resistant bacteria; and to identify a multitude of other indicators of public health and biosecurity.
First, the project will develop and deploy a novel cyber-physical platform for environment sensing and sampling from sewage and wastewater networks. This will be coupled with a computational biological infrastructure for characterizing biological signatures including metagenomics and metabolomics. The platform will be equipped with data visualization, analytics, and processing tools. It will also allow for spatial and temporal modeling of water flow mixing and balance in wastewater networks to devise and tune optimal spatiotemporal sampling strategies to extract maximum information....
