Abstract:

The presence of pharmaceuticals, including prescription, over the counter and veterinary drugs, in conjunction with personal care products, have been categorised as emerging environmental pollutants under the acronym of PPCPs. The European Union (EU) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) have added different PPCPs in a list of priority substances to control and monitor in water, as they have been detected in wastewaters and storm water runoff. Irrigation with treated wastewater and the application of biosolids can facilitate the introduction of PPCPs into agro-foods, threatening the food chain. Thus, appropriate education to monitor and respond to these pollutants, including environmental decontamination and recovery, are highly relevant to protect the health of animals and humans. As a result, the Universities of De Montfort (DMU, Leicester, England) and Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares, Spain), developed highly specific training to protect, decontaminate and restore environments impacted by chemical substances in collaboration with researchers from Public Health England (PHE) in 2015, as part of full training to respond to chemical incidents. Since 2015, we have been testing and improving this training to respond to chemicals specifically affecting food production systems, following comprehensive feedback from DMU postgraduate students (MSc Advanced Biomedical Science). The training has been updated with different real case scenarios, in which students select appropriate protection, restoration and fate of affected product techniques or options, using the latest version 1.1. of the UK Recovery Handbook for Chemical Incidents (UKRHCI, 2020; publicly available on the PHE recovery website), to protect and decontaminate different food production systems (cereals, fruit and vegetables, milk, meat, eggs, honey, freshwater and marine fish and shellfish, foraged/domestically grown food and game, animal feed and by-products, breeding animals), according to the physicochemical properties of the PPCPs involved. These further developments, have resulted in an increase in the percentage of postgraduate students indicating acquisition of knowledge, specifically regarding learning to tailor different interventions to protect and decontaminate food production systems: [from 83.3% (16.7% neither agreed nor disagreed) in 2016/17 to all (90.9% agreed, 9.1% strongly agreed) in 2021/22]. The different cohorts analysed have consistently highlighted the UKRHCI as an appropriate resource for selecting their protection and decontamination options, especially the Chemical Recovery Record Form (CRRF), an interactive form associated with the UKRHCI (90.9% agreed, 9.1% strongly agreed; 2021/22). Although the developments undertaken have been shown to facilitate the acquisition of the main competences described in our training, students are required to have a certain level of background knowledge in environmental toxicology and emergency response to fully acquire all the competences considered in this training. Thus, participants have highlighted difficulties in understanding some of the recovery terms used in the UKRHCI, which are highly specific. This communication will describe recent developments to overcome this challenge, which are being implemented in the same MSc programme at DMU in 2022/23, and the initial analysis of the feedback collected.

Keywords:

Chemical incidents training, food production systems, recovery, public health.