ORGANOHALOGEN COMPOUNDS – Volume 66 (2004) 456 Introduction Toxaphene is an insecticidal mixture, produced by the controlled photochlorination of camphene. In the USSR similar insecticide – Polychloropinene was produced by chlorination of α-pinene with AIBN (azobisisobutyronitrile) as initiator. Natural camphene occurs in different essential oils in (+)-form as well as (–)-form. Production of a...

Determinative methods based on gas chromatography-negative chemical ionization mass spectrometry (GC-NCI/MS) provide improved sensitivity and specificity for toxaphene in environmental samples, but are subject to misidentification due to oxygen reaction in the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The goal of this study was to quantify the impact of co-occurring PCBs in fish tissue samp...

Toxaphene (camphechlor) was intensively used in the cotton growing fields of Nicaragua for decades with application rates as high as 31 kg ha(-1) in 1985. Although the use of this compound has recently been discontinued in the country, its intensive use in the past and its long persistence in soil allowed for the build up of large reservoirs of toxaphene in agriculture soils and a wide dispersa...

Recent developments in the analysis of toxaphene now enable a congener-specific analysis of toxaphene. However, the comparability of laboratory results still needs considerable improvement. Because of the complexity of the chromatograms multidimensional gas chromatographic techniques are recommended for a congener-specific determination of toxaphene congeners. Mass spectrometry with electron ca...

Exposure to toxaphene, an environmentally persistent mixture of chlorinated terpenes previously utilized as an insecticide, has been associated with various cancers and diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Nevertheless, the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for these toxic effects have not been established. In this study, we used a functional approach in the model eukaryo...

The multicomponent mixture toxaphene belongs to the most intensively used organochlorine pesticides worldwide. The total amount of toxaphene that has been applied is estimated to exceed one million tons. Although its use was discontinued in most countries in the 1980s, toxaphene residues are still frequently detected in various environmental samples and biota due to long-range atmospheric trans...

background: toxaphene is a chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide. the residues of which have been documented throughout the biosphere including water, ground water, soil and lake sediments, even though its use was banned some years ago. toxaphene has been known as an important environmental pollutant as a result of its persistence in the environment, bioaccumulation and bio magnification in food ...

A variety of organochlorine pesticides have been shown to adversely affect embryonic development. A number of abnormalities have been documented in alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) from highly-contaminated Lake Apopka, FL, USA that are similar to the results of experimental studies exposing embryos to pesticides. In the current study, we exposed developing alligator embryos to varying co...

Three sets of 15 pairs of black ducks (Anas rubripes) were given 0, 10, or 50 ppm toxaphene in a dry mash diet for a period of 19 months, which included two breeding seasons. Survival of adults was not affected, but the weights of treated males were depressed during the summer months. Egg production, fertility, hatchability, eggshell thickness, growth, and survival of young did not vary with to...

The major toxaphene metabolites in sediment and soils (2-exo,3-endo,6-exo,8,9,10-hexachlorobornane [B6-923] and 2-endo,3-exo,5-endo,6-exo,8,9,10-heptachlorobornane [B7-1001]) were incubated with the isolated gram-negative bacterium Dehalospirillum multivorans. Within 14 d, biotransformation of B7-1001 was nearly quantitative, resulting in two penta- and six hexachlorobornanes, as well as one un...