Human hair as a pollutant dosimeter

Abstract

Human hair has been proved to be a better dosimeter than even blood for tracing most of the heavy metal toxins when they penetrate the biosphere. The high precision of the neutron activation analysis (NAA) enabled researchers to elegantly differentiate between endogenous and exogenous contamination and to thoroughly study poisonings caused by these physiologically-unimportant elements. An extensive amount of bench-scale work has been accomplished in these laboratories to show the capacity of INAA to detect the presence of 10 nuclides (or more) with a precision of about 5%. The principal objective of the present study was to employ this assaying power and the tendency of scalp hair to uptake metals from aqueous solutions, to design an adsorption system which can easily be used by the waste-management people who are searching for a cost-effective technique to monitor and remove these pollutants from relatively large volumes of industrial effluents.