Exposomics for better environmental health

The focus for World Environment Day in 2025 (June 5) is on ending plastic pollution.

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Micro-plastics represent one of the many thousands of chemical, physical and biological hazards that lurk in the air, water and living spaces for which we have neither the sensory capabilities nor sensing technologies to measure exposure and assess health risks. Thus, reducing the environmental disease burden continues to be a daunting challenge for public health.In India, rapid economic growth is increasing the scale and the complexity of environmental exposures and the interdependencies between the living environment and lifestyles. With India already accounting for nearly 25% of the global environmental disease burden, there is a need to develop newer paradigms for environmental management that rest on integrated health risk assessments. These must include all environmental factors into the study of disease development. The piece-meal approaches that define our current framing on environment or health indicators are likely to exaggerate environmental health inequities and result in spiralling health costs. We must embrace new and cutting-edge scientific developments in the field of “exposomics” to gain a more complete picture of disease etiologies over the life course and develop holistic prevention strategies. Strategic investments in long-term environmental health surveillance that integrate novel environmental and biomonitoring efforts with digital health and data science platforms are critical.Environmental disease burden