IV. CHARACTERIZATION OF CHOLINESTERASE ACTIVITY IN GREEN MUSSEL (Perna viridis) AS A POTENTIAL BIOMARKER IN MARINE BIOMONITORING 4.1. Abstract Green mussels (Perna viridis) play an important economic and ecological role in the coastal areas of Indonesia. P. viridis has been used as an eco-sentinel organism for marine biomonitoring programme in Asia regions. To magnify its competency as a releva...

Diatoms include a great diversity of taxa and are recognized as powerful bioindicators in rivers. However using diatoms for monitoring programs is costly and time consuming because most of the methodologies necessitate species-level identification. This raises the question of the optimal trade-off between taxonomic resolution and bioassessment quality. Phylogenetic tools may form the bases of n...

Raptors are good sentinels of environmental contamination and there is good capability for raptor biomonitoring in Europe. Raptor biomonitoring can benefit from natural history museums (NHMs), environmental specimen banks (ESBs) and other collections (e.g. specialist raptor specimen collections). Europe's NHMs, ESBs and other collections hold large numbers of raptor specimens and samples, cover...

Soldiers in operational environments are exposed to a variety of chemical substances. During deployment, they often move very rapidly from one “environment” to the other. Therefore ambient monitoring is very difficult and its outcome very complex to assess. Just as occupational and environmental assessments are becoming more common in industry, biomonitoring of chemical substances and their met...

In her Postulate of 20 March 2008, National Councillor Moser (Green Liberal, Canton Zurich) requested the Federal Council to consider the introduction of systematic analysis of various groups of chemicals (pesticides, PCBs, UV filters, etc.) to which the Swiss population is exposed. In its response of 6 June 2008, the Federal Council stated that it was prepared to investigate how existing resea...

OBJECTIVE To assess California firefighters' blood concentrations of selected chemicals and compare with a representative US population. METHODS We report laboratory methods and analytic results for cadmium, lead, mercury, and manganese in whole blood and 12 serum perfluorinated chemicals in a sample of 101 Southern California firefighters. RESULTS Firefighters' blood metal concentrations w...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has evolved rapidly over the past few decades as one of the most flexible tools in medical research and diagnostic imaging. MRI facilities are important sources of multiple exposure to electromagnetic fields for both patients and health-care staff, due to the presence of electromagnetic fields of multiple frequency ranges, different temporal variations, and fiel...

Biomonitoring—the science of measuring environmental chemicals in human blood, urine, and other tissues—made another modest advance with the 10 December 2009 release of the Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The report includes data on 75 substances not in the preceding report, for a total of 212 reported ...

New data are available in the field of risk assessment: the biomonitoring data which is measurement of the chemical dose in a human tissue (e.g. blood or urine). These data are original because they represent direct measurements of the dose of chemical substances really taken up from the environment, whereas exposure is usually assessed from contamination levels of the different exposure media ...

Timely and accurate biodiversity analysis poses an ongoing challenge for the success of biomonitoring programs. Morphology-based identification of bioindicator taxa is time consuming, and rarely supports species-level resolution especially for immature life stages. Much work has been done in the past decade to develop alternative approaches for biodiversity analysis using DNA sequence-based app...