Revised and new reference values for arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in blood or urine of children: basis for validation of human biomonitoring data in environmental medicine.

Reference values for environmental pollutants in the German population are established continuously by the Human Biomonitoring Commission of the German Federal Environmental Agency. The reference values (defined as 95th percentile) are usually derived from results of the German Environmental Surveys (GerES). However, current reference values for children are lacking since GerES II conducted in 1990/92 and additionally the first German Environmental Survey on Children (GerES IV) will not be finished until the end of 2006. As an interim solution, the commission derived in 2005 reference values for children aged 6-12 years from a survey performed in south-west Germany in 2002/03 (508 children) and the pilot study for GerES IV 2001/2002 (252 children). A new reference value of 15 microg/l for children was derived for arsenic in urine. The reference values for cadmium in whole blood (0.5 microg/l) and for cadmium in urine (0.5 microg/l) were confirmed. The following reference values were lowered: for lead in blood from 60 to 50 microg/l, for mercury in whole blood from 1.5 to 1.0 microg/l and for mercury in urine from 1.4 to 0.7 microg/l.