Abstract
Long term exposure to trace metals in various media is of great concern for people living in known pollution sources, such as mining and industrial activities. Health risk assessment and human hair analysis can provide important information for local environmental management. Information on distribution characteristics of trace metals in soil, water, sediment, air, local crops, and human hair from a typical mining area in southern China was collected. Results show there exists severely trace metal contamination in soil, sediment, and air. Arsenic and Pb contents in the local children’s hair are higher than the upper reference values, and the accumulation of residents’ hair trace metals shows great correlation with the ingestion and inhalation pathways. Arsenic contributes 52.27% and 58.51% to the total non-cancer risk of adults and children, respectively. The cancer risk of Cd in adults and children are 4.66 and 3.22 times higher than the safe level, respectively. Ingestion exposure pathway of trace metals largely contributes to the total non-cancer and cancer effect. The metals As, Cd, and Pb are major risk sources and pollutants that should be given priority for management, and ingestion pathway exposure to trace metals through soil and crops should be controlled.
Highlights
Like many other developing countries, such as Congo, Chile, and Vietnam, China has been suffering from serious pollution caused by trace metals [1,2,3,4,5]
The results indicate that children are sensitive to trace metal exposure, contaminated soil and dust may be ingested either directly or indirectly as a result of hand-to-mouth activity of children
We investigated the distribution of trace metals in different environmental media and residents’
Summary
Like many other developing countries, such as Congo, Chile, and Vietnam, China has been suffering from serious pollution caused by trace metals [1,2,3,4,5]. Rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in these countries has accelerated the release of trace elements from traffic, fuel components, and other non-specific sources [6,7,8]. Industrial and mining activities are one of the most important trace metal pollution sources in the environment [9,10,11]. After releasing into the environment, trace metals can accumulate in different environmental medias in many chemical forms [12] and damage human health through various absorption pathways, such as the soil-food chain, inhalation, and oral intake [13,14,15]. Trace metals exposure has been attracted great attentions [16,17,18,19,20,21]
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