Human Biomonitoring of Environmental Chemicals
The content you've requested is available without charge only to active Sigma Xi members, affiliates and American Scientist subscribers.
If you are an active member, affiliate or individual subscriber, please log in now in order to access this article. Be sure you've entered your member or subscriber number on your profile page.
If you are not a member, affiliate or individual subscriber, you can:
Abstract:
Which environmental chemicals should we be most wary of? Identifying the most potent threats isn't easy, as actual human exposure can be quite different than air, water or soil concentrations. While some models of human contact with toxicants have accurately estimated the risk of, for example, DDT exposure from eating fish, other models have been famous failures, including the attempts to calculate uptake of Agent Orange among U.S. service personnel in Vietnam. One solution to this uncertainty is biomonitoring, the analysis of environmental chemicals in human tissues. In this article, Sexton, Needham and Pirkle describe the CDC's use of biomarkers to chronicle exposure to more than a hundred compounds, including pesticides, dioxins, tobacco smoke and lead, even in concentrations as low as parts-per-quadrillion. They go on to discuss the findings and policy implications of the 2003 CDC report on these data, parts of which challenge our assumptions about pollution and public health.