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What's good for the fish is good for the people! Aquatic sentinels forecasting human exposure to emerging contaminants
Citation:
LAZORCHAK, J. M., D. L. LATTIER, M. KOSTICH, AND JOEL J. ALLEN. What's good for the fish is good for the people! Aquatic sentinels forecasting human exposure to emerging contaminants. Presented at SETAC, Tampa, FL, November 16 - 20, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Oral presentation at SETAC annual meeting, Tampa, Florida, November 16-20, 2008.
Description:
The term "contaminant of emerging concern" is being used within the Office of Water to replace "emerging contaminant", a term that has been used loosely since the mid-1990s by EPA and others to identify chemicals and other substances that have no regulatory standard, have been recently discovered in natural streams (often because of improved analytical chemistry detection levels), and potentially cause deleterious effects in aquatic life at environmentally relevant concentrations. They are pollutants not currently included in routine monitoring programs and may be candidates for future regulation depending on their (eco)toxicity, potential health effects, public perception, and frequency of occurrence in environmental media. CECs are not necessarily new chemicals. They include pollutants that have often been present in the environment, but whose presence and significance are only now being evaluated.