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 ...

Human biomonitoring provides an efficient and cost-effective way to identify and quantify exposure to chemical substances, including those having deleterious eff ects on human organisms. Once the risk of hazardous exposure has been identified and the mechanism of toxic eff ects has been elucidated, an ultimate decision about how to reduce exposure can be made. A particularly high risk of exposu...

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...

Background: Phthalates are chemicals which are widespread in the environment. Although the impacts on health of such exposure are unclear, there is evidence of a possible impact on the incidence of a diverse range of diseases. Monitoring of human exposure to phthalates is therefore important. This study aimed to determine the extent of phthalate exposure among mothers and their children in both...

Micronucleus (MN) is a biomarker widely used in biomonitoring studies carried out to determine the genetic risk associated to pesticide exposure. Many in vitro and in vivo studies, as well as epidemiological approaches, have demonstrated the ability of certain chemical pesticides to produce genetic effects including cancer and other chronic pathologies in humans; thus, biomonitoring studies hav...