Inhalation exposure of traffic police officers to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during the winter in Beijing, China
Introduction
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are widespread in the environment as persistent organic pollutants. This is particularly true in China where consumption of fossil fuels emits a large quantity of PAHs into the environment (Xu et al., 2006). Motor vehicle emission is one of the major sources of PAHs in urban areas. Elevated PAH levels are common in ambient air of urban districts with busy traffic (Zhu et al., 2000, Tsai et al., 2004). With rapid economic development in China, the number of motor vehicles increased dramatically in recent years. In Beijing, the number of cars increased from several hundred thousand to 2.5 million in less than a decade and is expected to reach five million by 2015 (Beijing Municipal Government, 2005). So significantly more PAHs are likely to be emitted into the urban atmosphere in future.
PAH contamination of urban atmosphere has brought much concern because of their acute to chronic toxic effects on living organisms (Bispo et al., 1999, Geffard et al., 2003). The result of a multi-pathway exposure model revealed that the average daily exposures of children, youths, and adults to PAHs in Tianjin were 4.3, 3.8 and 3.1 μg/kg d, respectively and around 20% of the total exposure was through inhalation (Li et al. 2005). The investigation covered entire Tianjin including all urban districts and rural counties. Inhalation exposure was more severe in the urban districts where PAH levels in the ambient air commonly exceed values for rural areas (Tao et al., 2006).
Traffic police officers often experience relatively high levels of PAHs in urban streets because of motor-vehicle emission. Significant cytogenetic damage in peripheral lymphocytes due to PAH exposure has previously been reported for traffic police officers working in Ankara, Turkey (Burgaz et al. 2002).
Our group previously monitored the inhalation exposure of traffic police to PAHs in Beijing urban area during the summer of 2004 when daily inhalation exposure was 280 ng/kg d on average, more than two times higher than that at the control sites on Peking University campus away from the busy streets (Liu et al., 2007). Beijing is one of the most polluted cities in the world and suffers severe air contamination, particularly in winter due to the national heating (Zhou, 2005).
On-duty traffic police officers often patrol the streets with large variation in PAH concentration. A personal sampling technique is best for monitoring exposure of police (Aizenberg et al., 1998) because patrol routes are irregular.
The main objective of this study was to investigate the inhalation exposure of traffic police officers to PAHs in Beijing in winter using personal samplers, to provide necessary information for an annually based exposure and risk assessment. Another point was to explore the effects of various meteorological parameters on the exposure. Sixteen PAH compounds studied included naphthalene (NAP), acenaphthylene (ACY), acenaphthene (ACE), fluorene (FLO), phenanthrene (PHE), anthracene (ANT), fluoranthene (FLA), pyrene (PYR), benz(a)anthracene (BaA), chrysene (CHR), benzo(b)fluoranthene (BbF), benzo(k)fluoranthene (BkF), benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), dibenz(a,h)anthracene (DahA), indeno(l,2,3-cd)pyrene (IcdP) and benzo(g,h,i)perylene (BghiP).
Section snippets
Standard and reagents
We prepared a working standard solution with a mixed stock standard of 16 PAHs (PAH-mixture 610/525/550) from Chemical Service Inc., Canada. Analytical grade n-hexane and cyclohexane from Beijing Reagent Co. were further purified by single stage distillation for standard solutions and for all experiments. Prior to use, all glassware was rinsed with potassium dichromate — sulfuric acid solution following ultrasonic cleaning.
Sampling
We collected samples on 10 separate days during a period from January 10
Exposure levels in the winter
The result was tabulated in Table 1. Briefly, the measured mean exposed concentrations of gaseous and particulate phase PAHs for the police in the winter were 4200 ± 2900 ng/m3 and 750 ± 1000 ng/m3, respectively, which were much higher than those measured at the two controls of 1800 ± 1000 ng/m3 and 470 ± 320 ng/m3, respectively. The concentrations were also significantly higher than those in the summer (Fig. 1).
We performed a two-way analysis of variance to test the differences in the exposure between
Acknowledgment
The funding of this study was provided by The National Science Foundation of China [40571140, 40032015, 40021101] and Ministry of Science and Technology [2002BA906A76].
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