Erratum to: Int Arch Occup Environ Health DOI 10.1007/s00420-010-0522-6

In the original publication of this article, four numeric values were wrong in the “Quality assurance and control” section. The right ones are found in bold in the following paragraph.

Quality assurance and control

All blood heavy-metal analyses were carried out by Seoul Medical Science Institute (SMSI), a laboratory certified by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. For the internal quality assurance and control program, commercial reference materials were obtained from Bio-RAD (Lyphochek [1] Whole Blood Metals Control), which showed that the coefficients of variation were 8.2% for three blood lead samples (reference values: 8.5, 26.0, and 48.0 μg/dL), 14.5% for three blood cadmium samples (reference values: 0.37, 1.11, and 4.30 μg/L), and 8.3% for three blood mercury samples (reference values: 4.7, 36.8, and 68.7 μg/L).