CONTENTS SPECIAL SESSION : ENDOCRINE DISRUPTERS 24 Developing

4 11 Multimedia Analytical Approaches to Monitoring and Measuring Suspect Endocrine Disrupting Compounds. INTRODUCTION Environmental Endocrine Disruptors (EEDs), endocrine modifying chemicals which are also environmental pollutants, are the subject of a special session at the 13th Annual Waste Testing & Quality Assurance Symposium sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Environmental Chemistry. While most recent technical symposia on this topic have, and continue, to focus on the effects of EEDs, the focus of this special session is on the analysis of EEDs. The analysis of EEDs in environmental matrices (e.g., water, air, soil, wastes, and biota including both plants and animals) is critical to future regulatory monitoring of them as well as to an understanding of their occurrence, transport and migration within the environment, and their ultimate degradation. In order to be able to analyze for EEDs several prerequisites are necessary: The EEDs subject to monitoring and/or regulation need to be identified*; 2. Methods for EEDs need to be effective at concentration levels desired for monitoring**; and 3. Analytical reference materials must be available to calibrate the instruments used for the analyses. The endocrine system refers to the complex system that involves the brain and associated organs and tissues of the body. These include the pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal glands and the male and female reproductive systems, all of which release hormones into the bloodstream. In particular the sex hormones include estrogens in females and androgens in males. Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) consist of synthetic and naturally occurring chemicals that affect the balance of normal hormonal functions in animals. Depending on their activity they may be characterized as estrogen modulators or androgen modulators. They may mimic the sex hormones estrogen or androgen (thereby producing similar responses to them) or they may block the activities of estrogen or androgen. 1 There are three categorical sources of EDCs: 2 1. Pharmaceuticals-One of the first recognized synthetic EDCs was diethylstilbestrol (DES), a pharmaceutical product given to pregnant women from 1948 to 1972 to help prevent miscarriages. It caused clear-cell carcinoma in the vagina, reproductive abnormalities in female offspring, and a much higher than normal rate of genital defects in male babies.