National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals
The National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals is a new publication that will provide an ongoing assessment of the U.S. population's exposure to environmental chemicals using biomonitoring. For this Report, an environmental chemical means a chemical compound or chemical element present in air, water, soil, dust, food, or other environmental media. Biomonitoring is the assessment of human exposure to chemicals by measuring the chemicals or their metabolites in human specimens, such as blood or urine. This first edition of the Report presents levels of 27 environmental chemicals measured in the U.S. population. These chemicals include metals (e.g., lead, mercury, and uranium), cotinine (a marker of tobacco smoke exposure), organophosphate pesticide metabolites, and phthalate metabolites. The first release of the Report presents data for the general U.S. population for 1999 from CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Because the sample size in any one year of NHANES is relatively small and for 1999 the survey was conducted in only 12 locations across the country, and because most analyses were conducted in subsamples of the population, more data will be needed to confirm these findings and to allow more detailed analysis to describe exposure levels in population subgroups.