In order to study environmental contamination by cytostatic drugs in Portugal hospitals, sampling campaigns were conducted in three hospitals in 2015 (112 samples). Platinum containing drugs and fluorouracil were chosen because both were administered in high amounts. The detection limit was 0.01 pg/cm2 for platinum and 0.1 pg/cm2 for fluorouracil. The results show that spills occur mainly on th...

Soil contamination with potentially toxic elements (PTEs) in agricultural lands, in part, is responsible for limiting the crop productivity and the food chain contamination. The objective of this study were to asses the limiting of crop productivity by cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb), the potential transfer and bioaccumulation of these PTEs in plants, and ultimately the food chain contamination to e...

The BiPo project is dedicated to the measurement of extremely low radioactive contaminations of SuperNEMO ββ source foils (Tl < 2 μBq/kg and Bi < 10 μBq/kg). A modular BiPo1 prototype with its 20 modules and its shielding test facility is running in the Modane Underground Laboratory since February, 2008. The goal of this prototype is to study the backgrounds and particularly the surface contami...

BACKGROUND Existence of bacterial host-cell DNA contamination in biopharmaceutical products is a potential risk factor for patients receiving these drugs. Hence, the quantity of contamination must be controlled under the regulatory standards. Although different methods such as hybridization assays have been employed to determine DNA impurities, these methods are labor intensive and rather expen...

In the last decade, the global emergence of carbapenem resistance in Enterobacteriaceae has posed great concern to public health. Data concerning the role of environmental contamination in the dissemination of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are currently lacking. Here, we aimed to examine the extent of CRE contamination in various sites in the immediate surroundings of CRE carrie...

We consider the problem of placing sensors in a network to detect and identify the source of any contamination. We consider two variants of this problem: 1) sensorconstrained : we are allowed a fixed number of sensors and want to minimize contamination detection time; and 2) time-constrained : we must detect contamination within a given time limit and want to minimimize the number of sensors re...

Atmospheric contamination has deteriorated the health of plants and animals all over the globe. In particular, pollutants such as benzene(C6H6) has accelerated the rate of cancer among human beings. Therefore, accurate evaluation of the pollutant in the atmosphere is necessary by traffic supervision in urban areas. To reduce atmospheric contamination, an effective mobile strategy planning must ...

The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will perform a systematic investigation of ionization cooling with muon beams of momentum between 140 and 240 MeV/c at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory ISIS facility. The measurement of ionization cooling in MICE relies on the selection of a pure sample of muons that traverse the experiment. To make this selection, the MICE Muon Beam...