Pellizzari, ED; Hartwell, TD; Harris, BS III; Waddell, RD; Whitaker, DA; Erickson, MD
It is becoming increasingly important to correlate ambient environmental pollutant levels with human body burden. Establishment of this correlation ("exposure assessment") may provide a link between pollution and health effects. This correlation is of interest for both scientific research and regulatory risk assessment.
Measurement of pollutant body burden levels generally requires invasive techniques (exceptions are breath and urine sampling) which are undesirable from the subjects' viewpoint. Some invasive techniques are generally regarded as acceptable (e.g., blood samples), while others are generally considered unacceptable from living donors (adipose tissue, internal organs etc.). Mother's milk is an attractive medium for several reason~ (i) sample collection is reasonably straightforward; (2) milk contains a high amount of fat, so fat-soluble pollutants are likely to be found in higher concentrations in milk than in blood or urine; (3) large (50-100 mL) volumes are easily collected for analysis, increasing analytical reliability and detection limits; and (4) the population of nursing mothers is large relative to pathology samples such as adipose tissue. In addition, an assessment of pollutant concentrations in mother's milk may be used to predict the pollutant intake by the nursing infant. The major disadvantages of mother's milk as a human sampling medium relate to the sampling demography: only young- to middle-aged females are nursing. Thus, in using mother's milk in a probability-based sampling framework, the extrapolation to the general population, would be fraught with difficulties, such as locating donors.
By far, most of the literature on environmental pollutants in mother's milk deals with chlorinated insecticides such as DDT, their metabolites such as DDE, or PCBs (ERICKSON et al. 1980). Only one reference (NIOSH) to the presence of a volatile organic pollutant, 1,2-dichloroethane, was found during an extensive literature search (ERICKSON et al. 1980). The 1,2-dichloroethane was found in the milk of a lactating woman purposively exposed to the compound in air.
The purpose of this study was to identify environmental pollutants in human milk by gas chromatography/ mass spectrometr (GC/MS) and to evaluate the utility of using this body fluid in specific pollutant studies for populations in the vicinity of chemical manufacturing plants and/or industrial user facilities.