Study of organohalogens in foodstuffs and environmental samples by neutron activation analysis and related techniques

Organohalogens, especially organochlorinated compounds (OCs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), have long been recognized as a potential threat to human health and, therefore, these compounds have been widely investigated in foods [3, 27], vegetation [9, 14], and the atmosphere [1, 11]. Recently, interest in using extractable organohalogens (EOX) as parameters for the quantification of total organohalogen content in sediment [7], biota [8], and water [20] has dramatically increased. However, there is evergrowing evidence that traditional analytical methods such as gas chromatography (GC) and GC-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) could only provide information about the known OCs, which contributed to less than 20% of total amount of extractable organochlorinated compounds (EOCl) in samples and, therefore, the results could not reflect the actual OCs contamination levels [13, 28]. INAA is a very convenient and quick method for halogen analysis, and is also the only analytical method currently available for simultaneously determining EOCl, extractable organobrominated (EOBr) and extractable organoiodinated compounds (EOI) in an extract [7, 8, 19]. Pine needles can accumulate organohalogens from the ambient air and, therefore, can serve as a biomonitor to monitor the levels of atmospheric contamination of these compounds [4, 15]. Pine needle can integrate contaminants over a long time and is much easier to collect than air Study of organohalogens in foodstuffs and environmental samples by neutron activation analysis and related techniques Diandou Xu, Zhifang Chai, Hong Zhang, Xueying Mao, Hong Ouyang, Huibin Sun