Human Biomonitoring of Environmental Chemicals

摘要

What chemicals in your daily rou-tine should you be most concerned about? The volatile organic compounds from your carpet? The exhaust fumes on the road to work? The pesticide residues in the apple in your lunch? Most of us are exposed to low levels of thousands of toxic chemicals every day. How can a person―or a nation―decide which substances should be controlled most rigorously? One strategy is to go after the largest sources of pollution. This approach certainly makes sense when those pollutants have obvious and widespread consequences, such as warming the globe, causing algal blooms, eroding the ozone layer or killing off wildlife. But for protecting human health, this strategy does not serve so well, because the link between a given compound and its biological effects can be difficult to gauge. For epidemiologists to correlate environmental pollutants with health problems, they need to know who has been exposed and at what level.