Approaches to Monitoring Organic Environmental Contaminants in Food

Trace quantities of potentially toxic organic compounds are frequently found in the environment. These compounds sometimes possess properties that may have teratogenic, mutagenic, and even carcinogenic effects on humans and animals. Some of the compounds, such as pesticides, have been intentionally released into the environment (1), while others have found their way into the environment by accident, through carelessness, or as byproducts of industrial processes. Many of these compounds are subject to breakdown in the environment as a result of both physiochemical and biological processes, such as chemical weathering, photodecomposition, metabolism, and biodegradation by micro-organisms (1,2). In many cases, it is not uncommon for the breakdown products to have greater health effects on humans and animals, than the parent compounds. Because of the potentially toxic properties of so many of these compounds and their breakdown products, several pieces of Federal legislation have been enacted in recent years to monitor, evaluate, and control the amounts of the pollutants in order to protect our health and environment. As a result, monitoring ] (screening) programs have been established for many types of organic pollutants in the environment. All of these programs rely heavily on the ability of analysts to correctly identify and quantify these compounds at the parts per million (ppm) and parts per billion (ppb) levels in a variety of sample matrices (3). In o r d e r t o s u c c e s s f u l l y o b t a i n u s e f u l i n f o r m a t i o n a t t h e s e c o n c e n t r a t i o n l e v e l s , i t i s e s s e n t i a l t h a t m e t h o d s w h i c h a r e s e n s i t i v e a n d s e l e c t i v e b e d e v e l o p e d a n d u s e d . W h a t e v e r m e t h o d i s u l t i m a t e l y