Prof. Noel Aquilina from the Department of Chemistry is currently serving as a co-guest editor for two special issues. The first special issue is entitled “”. It will be published in the section “” in the journal “”.
We are exposed through different routes to an enormous amount of compounds which have different toxicities. Understanding the mechanisms on how exposure from different sources leads to health effects is complex and requires a lot of high quality data. Without suitable tools, understanding the properties and the dispersion of toxics would be close to impossible.
Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence can improve our understanding of how toxic compounds operate. These newer approaches help defining new strategies to elucidate a better vision of the complex, toxicological problem in an unprecedented way and allows scientists to propose improvements on how to prevent harm or to aid healthcare.
The second special issue entitled “” will be published in the new journal “”.&Բ;
While the level of scientific understanding about tobacco chemistry and the harm cigarette smoking and passive smoke cause is high, the same cannot be said about thirdhand smoke (THS) (THS is the tobacco smoke residues in indoor environments that remain, react and/or re-emit from materials and/or re-suspend from surfaces).
Complicating matters further, today’s realities are not limited solely to tobacco smoke, because for quite some time now, the tobacco industry has shifted its marketing strategies. Different age groups in diverse communities are gravitating towards the use of electronic cigarettes and marijuana, most of the times in combination with tobacco and nicotine extracts. This landscape is changing very fast and is barely regulated.
The use of electronic delivery systems are becoming increasingly popular for a variety of flavoured aerosols, with or without nicotine, delivering the subtle message that these are a “healthier” option than tobacco smoking.
This special issue will deal with THS coming from the Triangulum of tobacco, marijuana, and electronic cigarettes generated in today’s smoking styles and their health consequences due to short and long-term exposure.
The Department of Chemistry is active through its PhD program, in collaboration with the , at the University of Birmingham, UK, to contribute to advances in exposure science and environmental health. Mr Renato Camilleri optimized and validated a method to analyse metals in fine particulate matter at trace and ultra-trace levels under the supervision of Prof. Noel Aquilina and co-supervision of Prof. Alfred J. Vella.
This method allows a better quantification of 20 metals in air samples whose particulate mass concentration is low and thus challenging to quantify adequately. An important improvement has been to increase the throughput of analysis substantially. The paper has been published and can be viewed in the journal .
