A Preliminary Study on the Route of Mercury Exposure among Residents Living in Songyuan Area

The mercury concentrations in hair,retail fish,fishcanned,meat,egg samples were determined in this paper.The results showed that the residents whose hair mercury concentrations exceeded the standard set by USEPA were 27.26% which indicated that there still was health risk from mercury exposure in this investigated region.The hair mercury contents in the group with fish-eating habit in high frequent was significantly higher than those in the control group(P0.01).There was positive relationship between human hair mercury concentrations and the amount of fish-eating of residents(r=0.243,P0.05),which indicated that hair mercury contents increased with the increase of the amount of fish-eating.The different sources of drinking water and the habit of meat-eating and milk-drinking did not impact the human hair mercury content.Therefore,the hair mercury concentrations in the subgroup with the habit of egg-eating in high frequent was significantly higher than those in the control subgroup.It suggested that the fish-consumption was the important and main mercury exposure route to the residents in this area.