Thai Khanh Phong

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Queensland

Objectives: Alcohol consumption in Vietnam increased significantly over past decade alongside its economic development. However, in recent years, several alcohol control measures including a new drink-driving law and taxes as well as the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the consumption levels. This study aimed to monitor alcohol use trends in Hanoi...

This cross-sectional study examined the one-year prevalence of respiratory symptoms (RS) and the influence of home and out-of-school factors among 1,033 schoolchildren (aged 9-12) in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. PM2.5 levels were also monitored in schools near major roads and residential areas. Near major roads and in residential areas the pre...

This study explores the synthesis and efficiency of iron-doped graphitic carbon nanosheet (GCN) composites derived from coconut biochar for the removal of toxic metals (As, Cd, Cu, Pb, Se, and Zn). The materials were characterized using FTIR, XPS, SEM–EDS, and ICP-MS techniques. FTIR and XPS analyses confirmed the presence of functional groups and...

The study aims to evaluate the effects of diurnal temperature range (DTR) on all causes, cardiovascular and respiratory conditions in the Central Coast of Vietnam, a tropical, low-income region with high DTR exposure but limited research. Daily hospital admission data from the largest hospitals in three provinces were analyzed alongside meteorologi...

Background and Aims Between 2018 and 2020, Australia implemented major policy changes to improve the quality and safety of opioid prescribing, with a specific focus on oxycodone. This study used wastewater‐based epidemiology to assess the efficacy of Australia's regulatory reforms by measuring change in consumption of oxycodone via exploratory anal...

Tobacco-specific alkaloids and nitrosamines are important biomarkers for the estimation of tobacco use and human exposure to tobacco-specific nitrosamines that can be monitored by wastewater analysis. Thus far their analysis has used solid phase extraction, which is costly and time-consuming. In this study, we developed a direct injection liquid ch...

Introduction On 1 January 2020, Vietnam introduced a new law with harsher fines and penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol. Reports of empty beer restaurants following this implementation suggested the new law has the potential to reduce population‐level alcohol consumption. This pilot study aims to quantify short‐term changes in alco...

The ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is a significant concern, especially with the decrease in clinical sequencing efforts, which impedes the ability of public health sectors to prepare for the emergence of new variants and potential COVID-19 outbreaks. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been proposed as a surveillance program to detect and mon...

This study investigates the impact of weather information sources on consequences associated with extreme heat events, employing a cross-sectional survey conducted on hospitalized individuals who have experienced heat stress in Central Vietnam. Multiple information channels, including official agencies and social media, were found to significantly...

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is proposed as a cost-effective approach to objectively monitor the antidepressant use, but it requires more accurate correction factors (CF) than what had been used in previous studies. Amitriptyline is a popular prescription medicine for treating depression and nerve pain. The CF of amitriptyline employed in pr...

Tình trạng lạm dụng ma tuý đã trở thành vấn nạn của toàn cầu, gây tổn hại lớn đến kinh tế, chính trị, xã hội và làm suy thoái về đạo đức, lối sống. Theo báo cáo của Văn phòng Liên Hiệp Quốc về chống Ma túy và Tội phạm (UNODC), số lượng ma tuý bị bắt giữ tại Việt Nam không ngừng gia tăng trong các năm gần đây, đặc biệt là các loại ma tuý tổng hợp. D...

Monitoring urinary markers of dietary, disease, and stress by wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a promising tool to better understand population health and wellbeing. However, common urinary biomarkers are subject to degradation in sewer systems and their fates have to be assessed before they can be used in WBE. This study investigated the sta...

This study aims to investigate climate change's impact on health and adaptation in Vietnam through a systematic review and additional analyses of heat exposure, heat vulnerability, awareness and engagement, and projected health costs. Out of 127 reviewed studies, findings indicated the wider spread of infectious diseases, and increased mortality a...

SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, while the decline in clinical sequencing efforts hampers public health sectors to prepare for the menace of ongoing variant emergence and future COVID-19 surges. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been proposed to provide complementary insights on the variants being transmitted in communities. However, limited r...

Heatwaves are increasingly recognized as a severe natural hazard that pose substantial threats to human wellbeing and sustainability with physical, mental, and economic impacts. Heatwave Early Warning Systems (HEWSs) have emerged as a promising solution to mitigate these adverse impacts. This study aims to valuate a Short Message Service (SMS)-base...

Background Traffic‐related air pollution (TRAP) problems are unlikely to be solved in the short term, making it imperative to educate children on protective measures to mitigate the negative impact on their health. Children and their caregivers may hold differing views on wearing a face mask as a safeguard against air pollution. While many studies...

Drug consumption in prisons is a concern for the safety of incarcerated people and staff. Typically, drug use prevalence in prisons is estimated through urinalysis and intelligence operations, which can be intrusive and stressful. An alternative approach, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), was used in this study to estimate the consumption of lic...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) within concrete pads impacted by historical firefighting training using aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) may be potential secondary sources of PFAS due to surficial leaching. This study aimed to (i) characterize the effectiveness of two commercially available sealants (Product A and Product B) in mitigatin...

The high use rate for methamphetamine in Australia has led to the emergence of local clandestine production. Contamination of the properties being used for methamphetamine production or consumption poses adverse health risks to occupants, and thus remediation is highly desirable to protect them. However, the residue level and removal efficiency of...

Objective To systematically review and synthesise the findings of modelling studies on the population impacts of e-cigarette use and to identify potential gaps requiring future investigation. Data source and study selection Four databases were searched for modelling studies of e-cigarette use on population health published between 2010 and 2023. A...

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions on alcohol consumption in Australia remains unclear. High-resolution daily samples from a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) which served one of the largest cities in Australia, Melbourne, were analysed for temporal trends in alcohol consumption under extended periods of COVID-19 restricti...

In wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), nicotine metabolites have been used as biomarkers for monitoring tobacco use. Recently, the minor tobacco alkaloids anabasine and anatabine have been suggested as more specific biomarkers for tobacco use since nicotine use can be from both tobacco and non-tobacco sources. This study aimed to provide an in-dep...

Introduction: During the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia implemented a series of international and interstate border restrictions. The state of Queensland experienced limited COVID-19 transmission and relied on lockdowns to stem any emerging COVID-19 outbreaks. However, early detection of new outbreaks was difficult. In this pap...

Introduction: Mixed findings have been reported about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on smoking behavior in different populations. Aims and methods: In this study, we aimed to quantify changes in smoking prevalence through the proxy of nicotine consumption in the Australian population from 2017 to 2020 inclusive. Estimates of nicotine consu...

With wastewater surveillance being implemented worldwide to aid in managing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there is a need to understand the fate of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in sewer systems. Here we employed a sewer reactor to investigate sorption, decay and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewers. RNA con...

Monitoring the consumption of artificial sweeteners in the population is essential to help public health authorities understand the level of sugar consumption. There is a gap in knowledge of patterns and levels of artificial sweetener consumption in Vietnam. Using wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), this study aims to evaluate the use of artificia...

Metformin, the unique first choice medicine for type 2 diabetes (T2D) in the US and Europe, was not widely adopted in China until recently. We measured metformin in wastewater samples, collected in major cities in China every 2 years from 2014 to 2020, to understand spatial and temporal trends of metformin use in T2D treatment in China. The estimat...

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is expanding its applications to new targets of public health interest including relevant indicators of community well-being. However, the feasibility of new applications depends on the availability of appropriate biomarkers, which were usually evaluated against a set of criteria recommended by an international W...

This study aims to investigate the spatiotemporal trends and impact of COVID-19 lockdowns to the profile of physiochemical parameters in the influent of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) around Brisbane, Australia. One 24-hr composite influent sample was collected from 10 WWTPs and analyzed for a range of physiochemical parameters per week (i.e.,...

Background and aim: From 1 February 2018, codeine was rescheduled from an over-the-counter (OTC) to a prescription-only medicine in Australia. We used wastewater-based epidemiology to measure changes in population codeine consumption before and after rescheduling. Methods: We analysed 3703 wastewater samples from 48 wastewater treatment plants,...

Recent studies have shown that using international guidelines to diagnose metabolic syndrome (MetS) may underestimate its prevalence in different Asian populations. This study aims to determine the validity of anthropometric indicators and appropriate cut-off values to predict MetS for Vietnamese adults. We analyzed data on 4701 adults across four...

Consumption of amphetamine and methamphetamine, two common illicit drugs, has been monitored by wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) in many countries over the past decade. There is potential for the estimated amount of amphetamine used to be skewed at locations where methamphetamine is also consumed, because amphetamine is also excreted to wastewat...

A semiquantitative high-resolution mass spectrometry method was developed and applied to assess the occurrence of bromo-/chloro paraffins (BCPs) and olefins (BCOs) in the environment. More than 400 possible BCPs and BCO congener groups were detected in dust, air, and sewage sludge samples collected from Australia. Median chain analytes with the num...

It is important to explore air pollution and health effects in developing cities for early prevention rather than waiting for conditions to deteriorate as in the current megacities. This study aims to investigate the short-term health effects of air pollution in a large city in the Mekong Delta Region (MDR) of Vietnam. Air pollution data from Janua...

Monitoring the actual consumption of nicotine in the population is essential for formulating tobacco control policies. In recent years, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been applied as an alternative method to estimate the overall tobacco consumption in different communities around the world, with the potential to be used in resource-scarce...

Industrial sludges from wastewater treatment plants of industrial parks and a drinking water treatment plant in northern Vietnam were investigated in this study. The total concentrations of heavy metals (As, Cd, Cu, Cr, Ni, Hg, Pb, Zn) and other elements (Mn, Pd, Sb, V) in the sludges were measured using the ICP-MS method. In addition, the surface...

Combined effects of global warming and rapid urbanization replace green spaces with urban facilities. Children in urban areas are at a higher risk of heat-related adverse health effects. Our study aimed to examine the protective effect of urban green space on heat-related respiratory hospitalization among children under 5 years of age in Hanoi, the...

Metformin is the most widely used drug to treat type 2 diabetes. Monitoring spatial patterns of metformin use could provide new insights into treatment of type 2 diabetes and the distribution among populations. This study applied a wastewater-based epidemiological (WBE) approach to estimate metformin use in different populations across Australia an...

Post-anaerobic aerobic digestion (PAAD) is a promising strategy to further reduce the volume and improve the quality of anaerobically digested sludge (ADS). However, the effect of PAAD process on the fate of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) remains largely unknown. In this study, four...

Controlling and reducing PM2.5 levels are essential, but among many studies on this topic only a few have focused on assessing the effectiveness of air pollution control policies through fuel prices. This study aims to investigate the association between higher fuel prices and PM2.5 concentrations in Vietnam. Daily data on PM2.5 in the two largest...

Understanding artificial sweetener consumption patterns and levels in different demographics is important for formulating public health policies on controlling sugar consumption. There is a considerable knowledge gap with respect to the pattern of artificial sweetener consumption in China. To narrow this gap, wastewater analysis was used to assess...

Objective: Lack of recognition of asthma in childhood results in unmet asthma treatment needs and leads to the risk of sub-optimal respiratory health. The present study assessed the prevalence of asthmatic under-recognition in middle school children in Vietnam. Methods: We conducted a school-based survey among 15,112 Vietnamese children. Most of th...

The Marine Monitoring Program (MMP) was established in 2005 to monitor the inshore health of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and evaluate progress towards water quality objectives in Reef Water Quality Improvement Plans. The MMP provides information on the magnitude and spatial extent of pesticide contamination, reports on temporal variability, and pr...

Background and aims Metabolic risk factors are the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in recent decades, yet the burden of metabolic syndrome (MetS) has not been carefully assessed in Vietnam. This review thus aims to examine the prevalence of MetS and its related factors in Vietnam. Methods A systematic review was conducted using literatur...

Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewer systems, upstream of a wastewater treatment plant, is an effective approach for understanding potential COVID-19 transmission in communities with higher spatial resolutions. Passive sampling devices provide a practical solution for frequent sampling within sewer networks where the use of autosamplers is not feasib...

Air pollution is among the top risk faced by people around the world, and therefore combating it is among the top priorities. It begins with identifying the sources that contribute the most to local air pollution to prioritize their control. There are advanced methods for source identification and apportionment, but such methods are not available i...

The increasing global prevalence of gout and diabetes has led to a rise in the use of their respective medications, allopurinol and metformin. These are excreted via urine as oxypurinol and metformin, and are discharged into wastewater and the environment. Current environmental monitoring of those two polar chemicals requires labour intensive and p...

The fate and formation of perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) have been investigated during wastewater treatment processes but studies for the entire urban wastewater system comprising the sewage transport and wastewater and sludge treatment processes are scarce. This work performs an integrated assessment of the formation and fate of PFAAs in the urban w...

Wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 RNAhas rapidly developed worldwide. In low-prevalence settings, sampling in sewage networks is proposed to monitor community transmission. Passive samplers are cost-effective and suitable for catchments where autosamplers cannot be operated. This resulted in their pioneering applications in some countries, eve...

Historical use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) at firefighting training grounds (FTGs) has prompted questions regarding possible PFAS retention within concrete and subsequent releases to the environment. This investigation seeks to better understand the release of five PFAS from concrete cores collected from a legacy FTG. The vertical...

Wastewater-based epidemiology is a potential complementary technique for monitoring the use of performance- and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs), such as anabolic steroids and selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMs), within the general population. Assessing in-sewer transformation and degradation is critical for understanding uncertainties asso...

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are known to be significant sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to the environment. In this study, PFAS were measured in the influent of 76 municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) serving approximately 53% of the Australian population. Of fourteen target PFAS, twelve analytes including six...

Polar lipids were recently found to have the surfactant property that could interfere with the bacterial adherence process during biofilm formation, a promising effect against the bacterial contamination on food processing surfaces. This study aimed to investigate the effect of surface conditioning of polar lipids such as phosphatidylcholine and sp...

Illicit drug use is a serious issue in Vietnam, but information about their prevalence is scarce, mainly based on seizure data. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is an alternative tool for obtaining such information, especially when stigma related to drug use can hinder survey approaches. The study aimed to apply WBE to assess the prevalence of u...

Background Alcohol consumption is a leading preventable risk factor for morbidity and mortality in China. Understanding drinking patterns provides important data to inform public health policies in alcohol control, especially in specific groups like university students. This study aims to assess the alcohol consumption patterns and level of use in...

Understanding smoking patterns in the population is essential for formulating public health and tobacco control policies. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a valuable complementary approach to conventional survey methods to measure tobacco use, providing non-invasive information in an objective and cost-effective manner. This study estimates t...

Understanding the in-sewer stability of analgesic biomarkers is important for interpreting wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) data to estimate community-wide analgesic drugs consumption. The in-sewer stability of a suite of 19 analgesics and their metabolites was assessed using lab-scale sewer reactors. Target biomarkers were spiked into wastewate...

Incense burning is a common cultural and religious practice in many Asian countries including Vietnam. However, there is scarce information about the impact of incense burning in the residential indoor environment. In this study, we quantified the concentrations of PM2.5 indoor and outdoor and assessed the influence of incense burning on indoor air...