Team:USP-Brazil/Problem

The consumption of alcoholic beverages is part of global culture. Many places in the world have native alcoholic drink, which consumption is related to local events, parties and festivals [3]. Today, the global market of alcoholic drinks generates over a trillion dollars yearly [1].

Even though the consumption is large, most alcoholic beverages are not included as a formal share of the market. The commercialization of “non-standard”, and the problem of adulterated beverages, despite both being neglected topics, is an increasing risk in leisure events. An estimate by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that about 30% of the alcoholic drinks sold in the world are not registered, reaching two-thirds of all the consumption in India, and shocking 90% in East Africa [2][3]. It is a global issue that has raised the concern of international organizations such as ICAP and Amphora Project.

Figure 1: Infographic showing the proportion between registered and unregistered drinks around the world.

Noncommercial beverages represent a serious risk to global public health, essentially due to the possible presence of drink contaminants that might lead to intoxications, and even to death. The mostly found contaminants are methanol, long chain alcohols, acetaldehyde, ethyl carbamate (possibly a carcinogen [4]) and metallic ions, such as copper and lead [5] [6] [7]. Among all contaminants, methanol regularly causes cases of severe symptoms and death, which appear often in the news. Our team decided to explore the possibility of detecting methanol in alcoholic drinks through engineered microorganisms, aiming to create a method that is not only accessible, but cheap and scalable, to analyse non-registered alcoholic beverages. In the process, we also intended to generate useful BioBricks for the Registry of Parts.

Figure 2: News showing the current problem relevance.

A Neglected Problem

Methanol can cause serious health disturbances, from metabolic acidosis to neurological problems [5]. According to the WHO, 100% of the pneumothorax and hemotorax traumas without an open wound (ICD 860.0 and ICD 860.2) related to consuming alcoholic drinks are attributed to intoxication by methanol/ethanol [2]. The main victims of those injuries are people from low and middle-income countries, with economic conditions that do not allow access to legalized quality products [7], and yet there has not been any relevant investment, neither from governments nor from the private sector, on developing tools to help solving the problem of intoxication by methanol [8][9].

A methanol detector would also be very useful to a second group of noncommercial drink producers: people from countries either developed or in development that take part in organized online communities, sharing methods of beverage production [10]. Unlike the previous case, their production is small-scale and solely for own consumption, and despite having access to specialized knowledge, often the producer's methods are quite rudimentary, lacking basic safety precautions [11][12][13]. A cheap and user-friendly methanol detector could improve the quality of the production of those home distilleries, reducing the risk of intoxication by methanol.

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References

[1] MarketLine. Alcoholic Drinks: Global Industry Guide. 2012. http://store.marketline.com/Product/alcoholic_drinks_global_industry_guide?productid=ML00004-125

[2] World Health Organization (WHO). Global status report on alcohol 2004. Geneva: Author (2004). http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_status_report_2004_overview.pdf

[3] World Health Organization (WHO). Global status report on alcohol and health. Geneva: Author (2011). http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alcohol_report/msbgsruprofiles.pdf

[4] B Zimmerli and J Schalatter. Ethyl carbamate: analytical methodology, occurrence, formation, biological activity and risk assessment. Mutation Research, 259: 325-350 (1991).

[5] DW Lachenmeier, J Rehm and G Gmel. Surrogate Alcohol: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go?. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, vol. 31, nº 10 (2007).

[6] DW Lachenmeier et al. Is contaminated unrecoredd alcohol a health problem in the European Union? A review of existing and methodological outline for future studies. Addiction (Society for the Study of Addiction), vol. 106: 20-30 (2011).

[7] International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). Producers, Sellers, and Drinkers: Studies of Noncomercial Alcohol in Nine Countries [Monograph]. Washington, DC (2012).

[8] International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). Noncommercial Alcohol in Three Regions. Washington, DC, Review 3 (2008).

[9] CM Morel. Neglected diseases: under-funded research and inadequate health interventions. EMBO reports, vol. 4 (2003).

[10] http://homedistiller.org/forum/

[11] http://homedistiller.org/intro/methanol/methanol

[12] http://homedistiller.org/distill/dtw/toss

[13] KA Berglund. Artisan Distilling - A Guide for Small Distilleries. Edition 1.0.0 (2004). http://distillery-yeast.com/free-pdf-documents/