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A COMPARISON OF EXTRACTION EFFICIENCIES IN SEAFOOD MATRICES USING A SYNTHETIC STOMACH AND AN ACCELERATED SOLVENT EXTRACTION APPROACH WITH IC-ICP-MS DETECTION
Citation:
Gallagher, P A., C A. Schwegel, J T. Creed, A. Heck, AND X. Wei. A COMPARISON OF EXTRACTION EFFICIENCIES IN SEAFOOD MATRICES USING A SYNTHETIC STOMACH AND AN ACCELERATED SOLVENT EXTRACTION APPROACH WITH IC-ICP-MS DETECTION. Presented at European Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, Lillehammer, Norway, February 4-8, 2001.
Impact/Purpose:
To develop an arsenic speciation protocol for the analysis of dietary components and composite diets in order to provide a more accurate assessment of human exposure to arsenicals.
Description:
Seafood is one of the largest sources of dietary arsenic exposure. Because most of the arsenic present is non-toxic (such as arsenobetaine [AsB]), the consumption of seafood is thought to result in a low risk or non-toxic exposure. This can be misleading for two reasons. First, while toxic arsenicals (such as monomethylarsonic acid [MMA], dimethylllarsinic acid [DMA], and inorganic arsenic) may be present in seafoods at fractional levels, the total arsenic concentration can exceed 50 ppm. At these high levels, the fractional component results in microgram doses of toxic arsenic species. Secondly, toxic arsenicals can represent 50% of the total arsenic present in certain kelp based seafoods. This exposure could easily exceed microgram quantities of toxic arsenic species but a typical ingestion of kelp is limited to gram quantities. In either case, these exposure to toxic arsenicals are comparable to those predicted from drinking water using an arsenic maximum contaminant level [MCL] of 5 ug/L and 2 L/day consumption rates. Therefore, seafood ingestion can be a signficant exposure route for toxic arsenicals and the estimation of this exposure improves the reliability of the overall arsenic risk assessment.