Bioinformatics Tools for Environmental Health Surveillance

Abstract

The aim of this research is to show how bioinformatics can improve environmental health surveillance with a view to identification and tracking of environmental contaminants as well as their health effects. It seeks to explore various bioinformatics methods for analyzing different ‘omics’ data in the environment (for example, metabolomics and metagenomics) for pathogen detection, antimicrobial resistance genes and toxic substances. This study proposes a system design integrating high-throughput sequencing data with analytical pipelines and databases to achieve higher resolution and speed when identifying environmental health risks. Bioinformatics allows rapid profiling of environmental samples leading to earlier detection of threats which enables proactive intervention strategies in public health. The importance herein lies in advancing proactive and predictive approaches towards managing environmental health.