Human biomonitoring (HBM) has proven an extremely valuable tool for determining which chemicals are getting into people, detecting trends in population exposures over time, and identifying populations with exposures above background. The potential significance of the HBM data in the context of existing toxicology data and risk assessments can be assessed if chemical-specific quantitative screen...

For many years, the analysis of micronuclei (MN) has been successfully applied to human biomonitoring of in vivo genotoxin exposure and provides a sensitive and relatively easy methodology to assess genomic instability. However, there is a need for automation of MN analysis for rapid, more reliable and non-subjective MN detection. In this review, we evaluate the application of automated image a...

Biomonitoring of waterbodies is vital as the number of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic ecosystems keeps growing. However, the continuous decrease in funding makes it impossible to meet monitoring goals or sustain traditional manual sample processing. In this paper, we review what kind of statistical tools can be used to enhance the cost efficiency of biomonitoring: We explore automated ident...

Monitoring anthropogenic impacts is essential for managing and conserving ecosystems, yet current biomonitoring approaches lack the tools required to deal with the effects of stressors on species and their interactions in complex natural systems.Ecological networks (trophic or mutualistic) can offer new insights into ecosystem degradation, adding value to current taxonomically constrained schem...

There are numerous biomonitoring programs, both recent and ongoing, to evaluate environmental exposure of humans to chemicals. Due to the lack of exposure and kinetic data, the correlation of biomarker levels with exposure concentrations leads to difficulty in utilizing biomonitoring data for biological guidance values. Exposure reconstruction or reverse dosimetry is the retrospective interpret...

BACKGROUND In order to investigate and monitor environmental health in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium), the Flemish government funded the Centre of Expertise for Environment and Health, which started a human biomonitoring campaign in 2001. In addition to environmental health experts measuring environmental pollutants and health effects in human beings, social scientific experts at...

Recently, conflicts and challenges have emerged regarding environmental justice and research ethics for some indigenous communities. Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) responded to community requests for breast milk biomonitoring and conceived the Breast Milk Pilot Study (BMPS). Despite having community support and federal and private funding, the BMPS remains incomplete due to repeated d...

Human biomonitoring has evolved beyond margins to ascertain exposure-response relationship in environmental associated human diseases. As occupational ailments continue to dominate global concerns, biomonitoring strategies have evolved better in terms of evaluating health risks associated with systemic uptake from chronic (long-term) environment exposures. Even though contributions of acute tox...

Biomonitoring is no more than a toolbox of techniques that we can use to keep a check on the integrity (or 'health') of aquatic ecosystems. Organisms that live their whole lives in water would not be present if conditions at any time during their lives had been too poor to sustain them. They can thus provide information on the environmental conditions that must have pertained in the river since...