Target organ assessments

Measurement of exposure can be made by determining levels of toxic chemicals in human serum or tissue if the chemicals of concern persist in tissue or if the exposure is recent. For most situations, neither of these conditions is met. As a result, most assessments of exposure depend primarily on chemical measurements in environmental media coupled with semi-quantitative assessments of environmental pathways. However, when measurements in human tissue are possible, valuable exposure information can be obtained, subject to the same limitations cited above for environmental measurement methodology. Interpretation of tissue concentration data is dependent on knowledge of the absorption, excretion, metabolism, and tissue specificity characteristics for the chemical under study. The toxic hazard posed by a particular chemical will depend critically upon the concentration achieved at particular target organ sites. This, in turn, depends upon rates of absorption, transport, and metabolic alteration. Metabolic alterations can involve either partial inactivation of toxic material or conversion to chemicals with increased or differing toxic properties. 

In general, plant-protection products are biocidal active substances and are therefore by nature toxic to target organisms. At least some of them are also toxic to humans therefore, the safe use of plant-protection products presupposes, among other things, an evaluation of worker exposure during re-entry, an adequate risk assessment on the basis of the various practical scenarios in agriculture and horticulture, and, if necessary, specific instructions for worker protection on the product label. 

The absorption efficiency term allows estimation of the effective dose or the amount of pollutant which crosses the membrane of the exposed tissue (e.g., the lung) and reaches a target organ (e.g., the liver). For many pollutants this type of metabolic data is not available and consequently 100% absorption is a common preliminary assumption in exposure assessments. For well-studied substances such as radionuclides, a methodology for calculation of target organ doses has been developed for bone marrow, lungs, endosteal cells, stomach wall, lower intestine wall, thyroid, liver, kidney, testes and ovaries as well as for the total body. 

FUN Tool. The 2FUN Tool provides outputs such as bioaccumulation of the substances in the target organs or concentrations in the human blood. In the present study the Pb concentration in the arterial blood of children/workers has been assessed. 

Cytotoxicity. The liver is the primary target organ for a variety of drugs and chemicals (Hasemen et ah, 1984 Farland et ah, 1985). The prevalence of drug-and chemical-induced liver injury is of concern because some xenobiotics can produce liver damage at dose levels that are magnitudes below that which causes cell death (Plaa, 1976). Environmental and commercial chemicals can increase this effect by as much as 100-fold (Plaa and Hewitt, 1982 Plaa, 1976). Studies of early cell injury caused by exposure to a toxicant can be undertaken easily in monolayer cultures of hepatocytes, whereas early cell injury is very difficult to assess in vivo. 

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