US EPA

1398355 

Technical Report 

Significance of hair mineral analysis as a means for assessing internal body burdens of environmental pollutants. Report on an IAEA co-ordinated research program 

1993 

NTIS/03000601_a 

GRA and I 

GRA and I 

In recent years there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of environmental pollution from industrial and agricultural substances and the harmful impact of such pollution on human health. There has been an increasing interest in using hair mineral analysis for biological monitoring of human population exposure to environmental mineral pollutants. This is because hair has some ideal attributes for such purposes. It can be collected by simple, non-invasive methods, and is easily sampled and stored. Concentrations of most of the toxic trace elements, i.e. mercury and lead, in scalp hair are at least an order of magnitude higher than those in body fluids or other easily accessible tissues. In addition, mineral elements in hair can easily be determined with good precision and sensitivity by nuclear as well as conventional methods of chemical analysis. Despite these apparent advantages of using hair as a biomonitor, serious uncertainty existed, and to some extent still exist, as to the meaningful interpretation of human hair mineral data in environmental health studies. The Co-ordinated Research Programme (CRP), which is the subject of this report, has attempted to tackle this problem by promoting a variety of studies (as distinct from routine monitoring) to investigate the quantitative relationships between internal body burdens of a number of elements of environmental health significance and their respective concentrations in hair. Refs, figs and tabs. (Atomindex citation 25:054358) 

Hair; *Organs; *Pollutants; *Biological Indicators; *Environmental Exposure; Arsenic; Body Burden; Cadmium; Copper; Lead; Mercury; Multi-Element Analysis; Neutron Activation Analysis; PIXE Analysis; Selenium; Skin; Tracer Techniques; X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis; Zinc; Foreign technology; *Public health; EDB/400101; EDB/560161