Environmental Fate of Mixtures as a Background for Human Exposure Monitoring

Numerous compounds are continuously released into the environment during their production and use. The resulting mixtures contaminate the environment and can be a potential threat to organisms including man. Monitoring programmes are designed to assess levelsof individual compounds and mixtures in various compartments of the environment. Such levels depend on the release rate and the environmental fate, which in turn is strongly influenced by physicochemical properties and stability. Monitoring can be carried out by chemical, mainly instrumental, analysis (chemical monitoring), analysis of humans and other biological organisms which are representative of exposure (biological monitoring), and observation of biological effects (toxicological monitoring).