Concentrations of Environmental Chemicals Associated with Neurodevelopmental Effects in U.S. Population
Section snippets
INTRODUCTION
One of the main benefits of recurrent biological monitoring (biomonitoring) of environmental chemicals in a representative human population is that we can ascertain if exposure to these chemicals is changing in that population. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), includes the collection of human specimens, primarily blood and urine, for such
Metals
Lead was measured (Miller et al., 1987) by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometry in a sample of EDTA-anticoagulated whole blood, which was obtained by venipuncture. The lead result is the mean of duplicate measurements.
Total mercury and inorganic mercury were measured in whole blood specimens by a modification of the method of Chen et al. (1998). Organic mercury was calculated as the difference between these two measurements.
Persistent Organic Pollutants
PCDDs, PCDFs, PCBs, and OC pesticides were all measured
Lead
In the 1999–2000 NHANES samples, blood lead concentrations were measured in all participants aged 1 year and older, and urine lead concentrations were measured in a random sample of NHANES participants aged 6 years and older. Because blood lead concentrations reflect both recent lead uptake and equilibration with stored lead concentrations, measurement of blood lead concentrations is preferred over urinary lead concentrations for correlating lead exposure and adverse health outcomes. Thus, only
CONCLUSIONS
These data should be of benefit to public health officials, legislators, regulators, risk assessors, and others concerned about concentrations of chemicals in our environment and their ability to get into our bodies. For many of these chemicals we were not able to estimate the geometric mean or some of the percentile data. However, even limited data such as the 95th percentile concentrations are of use, especially for assessing the high end of general population exposures and for comparing that
Acknowledgements
We thank the staff of the NCHS and Westat for conducting NHANES and making these specimens available. We also thank those in the CDC laboratory for analyzing these samples for the various analytes. We also thank Jessica Boyd and Cynthia Williams in the preparation of this manuscript.
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