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Most environmental monitoring measures the environment: what is in the air,
the water, the soil. Biomonitoring measures people — what has actually
ended up in their bodies.
Biomonitoring California was developed and run jointly by the **California
Department of Public Health**, the **Office of Environmental Health Hazard
Assessment** and the Department of Toxic Substances Control, with CDC
funding from 2014 to assess environmental contaminants across the state.
Two state laboratories provide the analytical capacity: the CDPH
Environmental Health Laboratory and the DTSC Environmental Chemistry
Laboratory. Between them they measure **metals, pesticides, parabens,
perchlorate, bisphenol A (BPA), per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS),
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)** and
organophosphate flame retardants (OPFRs).
The 2014–2019 studies
| Study | What it measured |
|---|---|
| Biomonitoring Exposures Study | Pesticides, PFAS, phthalates, PBDEs, BPA and metals, with Kaiser Permanente–Northern California members living in the Central Valley |
| Foam Replacement Environmental Exposure Study | PBDEs and OPFRs in the same participants before and after replacing foam furniture |
| Asian/Pacific Islander Community Exposures Project | Metals and PFAS in 200 Asian residents of the San Francisco Bay Area |
| Measuring Analytes in Maternal Serum | Metals, PFAS, PBDEs, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides during pregnancy, using archived maternal serum |
| California Regional Exposure Study | Metals and PFAS, with regionally representative sampling across the whole state |
The one to notice
**The foam replacement study measured the same people before and after they
changed their furniture.** Flame retardants migrate out of foam cushions into
household dust and from there into the people living with them — a chain that
is easy to assert and hard to prove.
Measuring the chemicals in a person, changing one thing in their home, and
measuring again turns an argument about exposure pathways into a
before-and-after with the same participants. That is an unusually direct piece
of evidence, and it is the kind of question biomonitoring can answer and
ambient monitoring cannot.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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