Landfills and waste water treatment plants as sources of ... - GKSS

INTRODUCTION
Chen et al. 2007a; Hart et al. 2008; Löfstrand et al. 2008; Ahrens et al. 2009d; Hutter et al.
2009; Kelly et al. 2009). However, for musk fragrances the availability of biomonitoring data
is rather limited compared to the other substance classes.
Bioaccumulation and bioconcentration of PFCs are directly connected to the carbon chain
length and increase with increasing number of fluorinated carbons (Conder et al. 2008).
PFSAs are more bioaccumulative than its corresponding PFCAs of same chain length (Houde
et al. 2006) PFCAs with chain length shorter than eight carbons are reported not to be
bioaccumulative according to current regulatory criteria (Conder et al. 2008). The potential
for bioaccumulation of PBDEs is directly linked to the size of the molecule. Therefore, lower
brominated congeners (four to seven bromines) are more bioaccumulative with
bioconcentration factors of higher than 5000 (Birnbaum and Staskal 2004). BDE209 has only
limited bioavailability (De Wit 2002).
Whereas, PBDEs and musk fragrances accumulate primarily in fatty tissues of animals and
humans, PFCs are stored in protein-rich repositories such as liver, gall bladder and blood
proteins (Hites 2004; Conder et al. 2008). For example, concentrations of PFOS and PFOA in
liver from Artic polar bears ranged from 263-6340 and 2-9 ng g -1 , respectively (Smithwick et
al. 2005). PBDEs were recently detected in adipose tissue of polar bears from various arctic
locations and ranged from 2.91-132 ng g -1 dominated by BDE47 (Muir et al. 2005). Kannan et
al. (2005) observed polycyclic musk HHCB between 4 and 25 ng g -1 in the blubbers of
dolphins and whales.
Half-life time of PFOS in monkeys is reported to be 150 days, whereas that of PFOA was 30
and 21 days for female and male, respectively (Lau et al. 2007). Half-lives in rats of
commercial pentaBDE congeners were determined between 19-105 days and were increasing
with increased degree of bromination (Birnbaum and Cohen Hubal 2006). MX has a
calculated half-life time in humans of 100 days (Kokot-Helbling et al. 1995). In fish they are
rather short (3 d for MX and MK) (Tas et al. 1997).
Furthermore, PFCs and PBDEs were reported to accumulate in the marine food web with
significant increases towards higher trophic levels (Sørmo et al. 2006; Kelly et al. 2009). In
contrast, biomagnification of musk fragrances to higher trophic levels was less pronounced
(Kannan et al. 2005; Nakata 2005).
1.4.3 Toxicity
PFCs, PBDEs and musk fragrances are subject to various toxicologically effects in humans
and animals. In general, acute toxicities of PFCs are moderate but increase with chain-length
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