Improvements in the total mercury extraction from human hair and Graphite-Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer (GFAAS) determination.

In this work, a methodology for the determination of total mercury in human hair is presented. This methodology is an improvement of a previous technique which has been reported by Chen et al. in 2002. This previous work was based on an acid digestion, C, cartridge clean-up, a 2,3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulfonate complexing agent, solid phase extraction and a graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometric determination. In the present study, the complexing agent has been replaced by the ammonium pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate followed by a liquid-liquid extraction and the clean-up has been avoided in order to obtain a less expensive and less time consuming methodology.