Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay toxicity evaluation method for dioxins in human milk

摘要

The contamination of food and the ecosystem by dioxins and its resultant effects on our health have been drawing much attention from the public. Thus, the investigation of human exposure to dioxins is an urgent and important task for the government.Since the Law Concerning Special Measures against Dioxins (Environmental Agency of Japan, 1999) became effective in Japan in 1999, the number of substances to be sampled and measured are expected to increase. Conventionally, high resolution gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (HR-GC-MS) has been used for the measurement of dioxins. However, a GC-MS method has a drawback in that it requires a complicated cleanup procedure for measurement of all types of samples as well as it is very time-consuming andextremely expensive to perform. Thus, the development of a method for measuring dioxins, which is inexpensive, easy to perform, and highly sensitive, has been highly demanded by the public and the government. One of the methods that may satisfy these requirements is an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and there have been some reports on the measurement of dioxins using ELISA. However, most of the reports dealt with standard substances (Stanker et al. 1987; Sugawara et al. 1998; Carlson et al.1998), fly ash (Harrison et al. 1997; Zennegg et al. 1998; Li et al. 1999), soil (Harrison et al. 1997; Harrison et al. 1998; Harrison et al. 1999), sediment (Li et al. 1999), and chimney soot (Zennegg et al. 1999), which contained dioxins in high concentrations. There has been no report on a practical assay that can deal with biological samples containing dioxins in extremely low concentrations such as human milk and blood. The conventional ELISA has been considered as a simple screening method, but less reliable compared with the GC-MS method.