Exposure and risk assessment of urinary trans, trans-Muconic acid in school-age children in the vicinity of a petrochemical complex in Central Taiwan.

School-age children living near large petrochemical factories may be at high risk of exposure to benzene released during manufacturing processes. We aimed to investigate the urinary concentrations of trans, trans-muconic acid (t,t-MA) in school-age children living near a petrochemical complex and to estimate their cumulative risk of benzene exposure. We examined an established cohort (Taiwan Petrochemical Complex Cohort for Children, TPE3C) of school-age children (aged 6-13 years) who lived near large petrochemical factories in central Taiwan between October 2013 and September 2014. The cohort comprised 297 children from five elementary schools, namely S.-C. Branch (n = 63, school A, ~0.9 km), F.-A. (n = 51, school B, ~2.7 km), C.-T. (n = 63, school C, ~5.5 km), M.-L. (n = 54, school D, ~6.9 km), and L.-F. (n = 66, school E, ~8.6 km). We analyzed the urinary t,t-MA levels of each participant and estimated their daily intake of benzene. We also performed multiple regression analysis to investigate potential risk factors for a high urinary t,t-MA level in the study cohort. The median urinary t,t-MA levels and median estimated benzene daily intake of the children from each school were as follows: school A, 64.07 ng/mL, 11.13 µg/kg/day; school B, 61.01 ng/mL, 15.32 µg/kg/day; school C, 59.38 ng/mL, 14.81 µg/kg/day; school D, 42.35 ng/mL, 11.67 µg/kg/day; school E, undetected, 0.14 µg/kg/day. The distance between a school and a petrochemical complex (greater distance: ß = -0.26, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.52 to 0.00, p = 0.053), and the age of the children (older age: ß = -3.44, 95% CI = -5.90 to -1.46, p < 0.001) were identified as potential risk factors. After confounders were adjusted for, the creatinine adjusted urinary t,t-MA levels of the school-age children tended to be lower when the distance between their school and a petrochemical complex was greater.

A low-cost eco-friendly fast drug extraction (FaDEx) technique for environmental and bio-monitoring of psychoactive drug in urban water and sports-persons' urine samples.

Nicotine is the most prominent psychoactive/addictive chemical substance consumed worldwide among young players in team sports. Moreover, urinary nicotine discharge and nicotine-based products disposal in environmental waters has been unavoidable in recent years. Therefore, sensitive monitoring of nicotine content in environmental waters and human urine samples is essential. In this study, we developed a miniaturized novel green, low-cost, sensitive, in-syringe-based semi-automated fast drug extraction (FaDEx) protocol coupled with gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID) for the efficient environmental and bio-monitoring of nicotine in aqueous samples. The FaDEx method consists of two steps; firstly, the target analyte was extracted using dimethyl carbonate (a green solvent) and extraction salts. After that, the extraction solvent was passed automatically through the solid-phase extraction cartridge at a constant flow rate for the cleanup process to achieve the sensitive nicotine analysis by GC-FID. Under optimized experimental conditions, the developed method showed excellent linearity over the concentration ranges between 20-2000 ng mL-1 with a correlation coefficient >0.99. The detection and quantification limits were 4 and 20 ng mL-1, respectively. The presented method was applied to monitor and assess nicotine exposure in sports-persons' urine and environmental water samples. The method accuracy and precision in terms of relative recovery and relative standard deviation (for triplicate analysis) were 85.4-110.2% and ≤8%, respectively. Finally, the impact of our procedure on the environment from a green analytical chemistry view was assessed using a novel metric system called AGREE, and obtained the greenness score of 0.87, indicating its an efficient alternative green analytical protocol for routine environmental and bio-monitoring of nicotine in environmental and biological samples.