Effective fisheries management instrumental in improving fish stock status.

Marine fish stocks are an important part of the world food system and are particularly important for many of the poorest people of the world. Most existing analyses suggest overfishing is increasing, and there is widespread concern that fish stocks are decreasing throughout most of the world. We assembled trends in abundance and harvest rate of stocks that are scientifically assessed, constituting half of the reported global marine fish catch. For these stocks, on average, abundance is increasing and is at proposed target levels. Compared with regions that are intensively managed, regions with less-developed fisheries management have, on average, 3-fold greater harvest rates and half the abundance as assessed stocks. Available evidence suggests that the regions without assessments of abundance have little fisheries management, and stocks are in poor shape. Increased application of area-appropriate fisheries science recommendations and management tools are still needed for sustaining fisheries in places where they are lacking.

Ethics issues experienced in HBM within Portuguese health surveillance and research projects.

BACKGROUND: In keeping with the fundamental practice of transparency in the discussion and resolution of ethics conflicts raised by research, a summary of ethics issues raised during Portuguese biomonitoring in health surveillance and research is presented and, where applicable, their resolution is described. METHODS: Projects underway aim to promote the surveillance of public health related to the presence of solid waste incinerators or to study associations between human exposure to environmental factors and adverse health effects. The methodological approach involves biomonitoring of heavy metals, dioxins and/or other persistent organic pollutants in tissues including blood, human milk and both scalp and pubic hair in groups such as the general population, children, pregnant women or women attempting pregnancy. As such, the projects entail the recruitment of individuals representing different demographic and health conditions, the collection of body tissues and personal data, and the processing of the data and results. RESULTS: The issue of autonomy is raised during the recruitment of participants and during the collection of samples and data. This right is protected by the requirement for prior written, informed consent from the participant or, in the case of children, from their guardian. Recruitment has been successful, among eligible participants, in spite of incentives rarely being offered. The exception has been in obtaining guardians' consent for children's participation, particularly for blood sampling. In an attempt to mitigate the harm-benefit ratio, current research efforts include alternative less invasive biomarkers.Surveys are currently being conducted under contract as independent biomonitoring actions and as such, must be explicitly disclosed as a potential conflict of interests. Communication of results to participants is in general only practised when a health issue is present and corrective action possible. Concerning human milk a careful approach is taken, considering breast-feeding's proven benefits. CONCLUSION: No national legislation currently accounts for the surveillance component of biomonitoring as distinct from research. Ethics issues arising within the domain of research are resolved according to available regulations. For issues encountered during surveillance, the same principles are used as guidance, completed by the authors' best judgement and relevant ethics committees' findings.

Quantification of urinary chorionic gonadotropin in spontaneous abortion of pre-clinically recognized pregnancy: method development and analytical validation.

Determination of environmental impacts on reproductive health and specifically on the incidence of early spontaneous abortion requires accurate estimates of the latter. This negative reproductive outcome can be detected by the pattern of elevation and decline of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels near and shortly beyond the expected time of implantation, requiring daily biomonitoring of hCG levels during the relevant period of the menstrual cycle. Prospective pregnancy studies to assess effects of potentially toxic exposures on human reproductive outcomes can involve up to three menstrual cycles and a huge number of samples in each, for the quantification of the inherently very low hCG levels usually can be determined only in serum. The invasive nature of blood collection, the number of samples needed for the development of prospective studies, and the lack of quantitative methods for the determination of low hCG levels in urine point to the need for collecting urine rather than blood and make it imperative to develop suitable quantitative methods for biomonitoring of very low levels of hCG in urine. This paper describes the development and validation procedures of an automated solid-phase two-site chemiluminescent immunometric assay for the quantification of urinary hCG in early pregnancy and early pregnancy loss. For the validation, both undiluted and diluted urine and control samples have been prepared. From the results, it can be concluded that the assay has a calibration range that extends to 5000 mIU/ml, with a detection limit of approximately 1.2 mIU/ml, practically identical to that found by the IMMULITE 2000 manufacturer's validation study. The intra- and inter-assay precision ranges up to a maximum of around 7%, meaning that the practical limit for functional sensitivity can be established as low as 10%. This means that the immunoassay from DPC can identify, with relatively high confidence, non-pregnant women and the typical "rise and fall" pattern of early pregnancy loss through analysis of urine samples. Results also lead to the conclusion that there is a very good agreement between expected and observed urinary hCG levels indicative of good immunoassay accuracy for the studied range of hCG concentrations. In terms of analyte stability, it can be concluded that urinary hCG is stable under the expected conditions required for ongoing investigations that include temperatures of 2-8 degrees C for up to 48 h and temperatures of around -20 degrees C for longer periods that can extend to over 3 months.

Human exposure to heavy metals in the vicinity of Portuguese solid waste incinerators--Part 2: biomonitoring of lead in maternal and umbilical cord blood.

As part of environmental health surveillance programs related to solid waste incinerators located near Lisbon and on Madeira Island, human biomonitoring projects have been implemented in Portugal, some of them focused on cross-sectional surveys of heavy metals in blood. One of the general aims of these programs is to provide Portuguese data on the extent and pattern of human exposure to the pollutants potentially released in the stack gases from the incinerators, namely heavy metals. The present investigation reports information specifically on blood lead levels of newborn-mother pairs living in the vicinity of the incinerators under study, as well as of statistically similar participants living outside the exposed area. For Lisbon, lead levels determined at the baseline period (T0), as well as three subsequent evaluations of potential specific impacts of the incinerator (T1, T2 and T3) are described in order to investigate spatial and temporal trends of human exposure to lead. Available data for Madeira, namely lead levels in blood from the study population before the incinerator started operation, is also described. For Lisbon, analyses showed a statistically significant decrease of lead concentrations in maternal (p<0.001) and umbilical cord blood (p<0.001) during the whole monitoring period. Practically "overt" transplacental exposure to lead was observed only in the Lisbon biomonitoring project and for some cross-sectional surveys. Baseline levels for Madeira were the lowest found in all observations already performed in both programs (maternal and umbilical cord mean lead levels of 0.4 microg/dl and 0.3 microg/dl, respectively). No statistical associations have been found between lead levels in blood and age neither for global populations from Lisbon and Madeira nor for specific groups included in the different observational periods.