A. W. Glynn+
L. B. Willett 1*
+Toxicology Division, The Swedish National Food Administration, Uppsala,Sweden
Department of Environmental Toxicology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
*The Ohio State University Department of Animal Sciences
Exposure assessments of good quality are of vital importance in epidemiological studies on human health effects caused by chemicals in food. It may, however, be very expensive to measure the actual concentrations of chemicals in the human body, and it is often difficult to get a high enough participation rate if the study subjects have to donate blood or body tissues for exposure analysis. Therefore, several studies have estimated the exposure of the study participants from the rate of consumption of contaminated food. In this review, we show that this approach is not possible to use in epidemiological studies, where possible health effects due to the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and chlorinated pesticides in food are studied in the general human population. In this case, consumption of contaminated foodstuffs is not a good predictor of the actual concentrations of the chemicals in the body. It is therefore necessary to further develop the analytical techniques so that analysis of organochlorines in human tissues can be made at a reasonable speed, cost, and inconvenience to the subjects involved.
1For more information, contact at: The Ohio State University, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, 128 Gerlaugh Hall, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691; 330-263-3792; e-mail: willett.2@osu.edu