Environmental Exposure, Biomonitoring and Exposure Assessment

Environmental exposure plays an important role in the development of diseases. However, individuals are exposed to complex mixtures of substances (e.g., chemicals, pollution, and diet) that change throughout a person’s life. Therefore, measuring these different types of exposure and investigating their association with disease is complicated, though necessary, as it forms the basis of individual risk assessment of a variety of types of environmental exposure. Biomonitoring, which is the quantitative measurement of environmental chemicals/pollutants in the human body, is used to evaluate an individual’s exposure. The appropriate utilization of biomonitoring provides information on occupational as well as non-occupational exposures. When the chemicals of interest are unknown, untargeted approaches, such as metabolomics, are used to generate semiquantitative measurements of internal exposure. These are complemented by environmental monitoring—performing external exposure measurements from lifestyle and unavoidable exposure which are mapped and quantified by wearable sensors and environmental samples. These techniques help identify unintentional and unexpected forms of exposure, which are difficult to establish using more conventional techniques such as exposure questionnaires. Once obtained, exposure data are compared to animal/human data to determine an individual’s risk of disease and are used to evaluate the effectiveness of policy actions and detect emerging contaminants. This Special Issue contains research at the intersection of environmental exposure, biomonitoring, and the assessment of health risks.