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Background and Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has a negative impact on the mental health of the population in general, and in college students in particular. Dental students have seen their teaching altered and their clinical practice reduced. This study was aimed at conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies reporting levels of depression among dental students during the COVID-19 and estimating the pooled prevalence of depression. Materials and Methods: Medline via PubMed and other databases were searched for studies on the prevalence of depression in dental undergraduates, published from 1 December 2019 to 1 September 2021. The pooled proportions of depression were calculated with random effects models. Results: We identified 13 studies from 9 countries. The pooled prevalence of depression in dental students was 37% (95% CI: 26-49%) with no variation due to gender, response rate or methodological quality. We only found a significantly higher prevalence of depression in studies from Asia compared to Europe and America. Conclusions: Our results suggest that dental students are suffering from higher levels of depression compared with the general population or other college students during the COVID-19 pandemic, with differences across regions. Measures to improve mental health and wellbeing of dental students during the pandemic are needed.

During the COVID-19, healthcare workers are exposed to a higher risk of mental health problems, especially anxiety symptoms. The current work aims at contributing to an update of anxiety prevalence in this population by conducting a rapid systematic review and meta-analysis. Medline and Pubmed were searched for studies on the prevalence of anxiety in health care workers published from December 1, 2019 to September 15, 2020. In total, 71 studies were included in this study. The pooled prevalence of anxiety in healthcare workers was 25% (95% CI: 21%-29%), 27% in nurses (95% CI: 20%-34%), 17% in medical doctors (95% CI: 12%-22%) and 43% in frontline healthcare workers (95% CI: 25%-62%). Our results suggest that healthcare workers are experiencing significant levels of anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those on the frontline and nurses. However, international longitudinal studies are needed to fully understand the impact of the pandemic on healthcare workers' mental health, especially those working at the frontline.

Non-target analysis (NTA) employing high-resolution mass spectrometry is a commonly applied approach for the detection of novel chemicals of emerging concern in complex environmental samples. NTA typically results in large and information-rich datasets that require computer aided (ideally automated) strategies for their processing and interpretation. Such strategies do however raise the challenge of reproducibility between and within different processing workflows. An effective strategy to mitigate such problems is the implementation of inter-laboratory studies (ILS) with the aim to evaluate different workflows and agree on harmonized/standardized quality control procedures. Here we present the data generated during such an ILS. This study was organized through the Norman Network and included 21 participants from 11 countries. A set of samples based on the passive sampling of drinking water pre and post treatment was shipped to all the participating laboratories for analysis, using one pre-defined method and one locally (i.e. in-house) developed method. The data generated represents a valuable resource (i.e. benchmark) for future developments of algorithms and workflows for NTA experiments. © 2021, The Author(s).

Trabajo presentado en la 1ª Jornada sobre Contaminación por Pásticos, celebrada en Barcelona (España) del 27 al 28 de octubre de 2020., Estimating exposure to phthalate plasticizers is crucial to perform appropriate risk assessment and develop control measures. In this study, we analyze wastewater to estimate the exposure to six phthalates within thirteen Spanish cities. Composite daily samples were collected over four consecutive days in Spring 2018 at seventeen wastewater treatment plants serving ca. 6 million people. Concentrations of phthalate metabolites were converted into population-normalized loads and used to estimate (i) metabolite levels in urine, and (ii) values of daily exposure to the parent phthalates. Population-weighted means of the estimated concentrations in urine varied between 0.7 ng/mL and 520 ng/mL. Compared to human biomonitoring data, very high levels were obtained for monomethyl phthalate, metabolite of dimethyl phthalate. This fact, together with literature data pointing to other sources of this metabolite in sewage led to its exclusion for exposure assessment. As for the remaining metabolites, results obtained on a local scale revealed the butylated phthalates as the ones posing the highest concern, particularly for toddlers. On a national scale, including all the sampled sites, di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate accounted for the highest percentage of total risk, followed closely by diethyl phthalate and di-iso-butyl phthalate., MCIU/AEI (projects CTM2016-81935-REDT, CTM2017-84763-C3-2-R, CTM2017-84763- C3-3-R, and CEX2018-000794-S), Galician Council of Culture, Education and Universities (ED481D 2017/003 and ED431C2017/36), Generalitat Valenciana (projects Prometeo/2018/155 and Prometeo/2019/040) and Universitat Jaume I (project UJI-B2018-55)

Resumen del trabajo presentado en el SETAC Europe 30th Annual Meeting, celebrado en modalidad virtual del 3 al 7 de mayo de 2020., Phthalate diesters are high-production-volume chemicals that have been widely used in the manufacturing and processing of plastics for more than 80 years. Recently, they have been included in the priority lists of dangerous substances in most of the industrialized countries. Ingestion is considered the major route of exposure to phthalates, either by consuming contaminated food, accidental ingestion of contaminated dust and soil, or licking of products in which they are contained. Once in the human body, phthalates are hydrolyzed to their corresponding monoesters and further oxidized or conjugated into glucuronide complexes and, finally, excreted. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a complementary approach to human biomonitoring to estimate the level of exposure to a substance through the analysis of its metabolic residues in urban wastewater, considering that raw wastewater is a highly diluted urine sample representing an entire community. The objectives of this study were to analyze the metabolites of 6 phthalate diesters in wastewaters from different locations in Spain and to assess the exposure to phthalate diesters in the investigated cities. Raw wastewater samples from 17 wastewater treatment plants, serving a total population of ca. 6 million inhabitants (13% of the Spanish population), were analyzed. The results show that the highest population-weighted exposure loads were obtained for diethyl phthalate, followed by dimethyl phthalate and the isomers di-i-butyl phthalate and di-n-butyl phthalate., The authors acknowledge support by Xunta de Galicia (refs. ED431C2017/36 and IGM postdoctoral contract, Plan Galego I2C-Modalidade B, ED481D 2017/003), the Spanish Research Agency-AEI (ref. CTM2016-81935-REDT/AEI and CTM2017-84763-C3-R-2) and FEDER/ERDF