On-site biological monitoring for exposure to VOCs by portable gas-chromatograph

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Biological monitoring of exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been achieved via their specific urinary metabolites. But, it is known that concentrations of parent VOCs in biological fluids such. as blood and urine, generally show closer correlation with the exposure intensity than their metabolites. In the last 10 years many publications have shown that the urinary VOCs are well correlated with environmental exposure and could therefore be used for biological monitoring, In the urinalysis, subjects can easily provide samples of sufficient volume for analysis. But, VOCs in biological fluids can be volatilized easily and that may cause loss of contents. For analytical quantification of VOCs in biological fluids, loss of VOCs during specimen collection and preservation is the most important uncertaintiesIn this work, we developed the method far on-site analysis of VOCs in biological fluids using head space gas chromatography, as on-site analysis can minimize a loss. We applied vial head space analysis and syringe head space analysis employing "Voyager", a field portable gas-chromatograph equipped photoionization detector (PID). By proposed method, blood and urinary trace concentrations of VOCs such as benzene, toluene, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene were successfully determined at sub-ppb level. On-site biological monitoring of environmental VOCs exposure of non-exposed subjects can be performed easily by the proposed method