Biomonitoring for environmental chemicals: Implications for the future of public health policy

Biomonitoring for environmental chemicals has the potential to transform the practice of environmental health. The release of the CDC Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals in 2005 provided an invaluable profile of the Nation's chemical exposures and provides a new lens to examine our environmental health strategies. Future reports will contain an even greater number of chemical measurements presenting the difficult challenge of interpreting the findings and understanding the public health implications. In 2006 National Research Council released a report Human Biomonitoring for Environmental Chemicals. This report provided a framework for the selection of population biomarkers, the design of biomonitoring studies, and the interpretation of biomonitoring results. This presentation will present an overview of the NRC report and examine the challenges and implications of the growing use of population biomonitoring in public health. Case examples such as mercury and PFOA will be presented to illustrate the value of biomonitoring for refining environmental health policies. Future applications of biomonitoring in risk assessment, population health surveillance, and epidemiology will also be discussed. In addition, a strategy for applying the high-tech tools of biomonitoring to the everyday challenges of environmental health will be presented.