Environmental and biological monitoring for the evaluation of occupational exposure to pesticides

The healthcare of workers occupationally exposed to pesticides makes use of monitoring programs data, given by analytical techniques based on the extraction of phytodrugs form environmental and/or biological matrices. Here various analytical procedures were compared to develop a method aimed to the simultaneous quantification of pesticides with different chemical nature. Pesticides were extracted from urine and from fibre paper pads, respectively, for biological monitoring purposes and for the evaluation of cutaneous exposure. Phytodrugs extraction from urine was optimized by comparing two different liquid/liquid extractions based both on a traditional procedure and on the use of diatomaceous earths. For both techniques two different extraction solvents were used and analytes recovery percentages were compared. The highest recoveries were obtained with classic liquid/liquid extraction with ethylacetate. The environmental matrix was treated analogously, and high recovery percentages were obtained with acetonitrile, acetone and ether. GC/MS-SIM analysis allowed the detection of most of the examined phytodrugs, except for fenbutatin-oxide and abamectin that require LC/MS-SIM analysis. Detection limits and accuracy of the proposed analytical procedures were calculated, and the methods are being applied to the evaluation of occupational exposure to pesticides in rural areas of South Italy.