Quantification of short and long asbestos fibers to assess asbestos exposure: a review of fiber size toxicity

Environmental Health

Review

Guillaume Boulanger¹  Jean-Claude Pairon²  Pascal Andujar²  Chantal Dion³  Marie-Annick Billon-Galland⁴ 

[1] ANSES (French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety), Maisons-Alfort, France;INSERM, U955, Equipe 4, Créteil, France;Université Paris Est, Faculté de Médecine, Créteil, France;Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal de Créteil, Service de Pneumologie et Pathologie Professionnelle, Créteil, France;Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail du Québec (IRSST), Montréal, Québec, Canada;Département de santé environnementale et santé au travail, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada;Laboratoire d’Etude des Particules Inhalées de Paris (LEPI – ville de Paris), Paris, France;

关键词: Asbestos;    Air pollution;    Environmental exposure;    Occupational exposure;    Toxicity;    Particle size;    Fiber;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1476-069X-13-59

 received in 2013-12-23, accepted in 2014-07-10,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

The fibrogenicity and carcinogenicity of asbestos fibers are dependent on several fiber parameters including fiber dimensions. Based on the WHO (World Health Organization) definition, the current regulations focalise on long asbestos fibers (LAF) (Length: L ≥ 5 μm, Diameter: D < 3 μm and L/D ratio > 3). However air samples contain short asbestos fibers (SAF) (L < 5 μm). In a recent study we found that several air samples collected in buildings with asbestos containing materials (ACM) were composed only of SAF, sometimes in a concentration of ≥10 fibers.L−1. This exhaustive review focuses on available information from peer-review publications on the size-dependent pathogenetic effects of asbestos fibers reported in experimental in vivo and in vitro studies. In the literature, the findings that SAF are less pathogenic than LAF are based on experiments where a cut-off of 5 μm was generally made to differentiate short from long asbestos fibers. Nevertheless, the value of 5 μm as the limit for length is not based on scientific evidence, but is a limit for comparative analyses. From this review, it is clear that the pathogenicity of SAF cannot be completely ruled out, especially in high exposure situations. Therefore, the presence of SAF in air samples appears as an indicator of the degradation of ACM and inclusion of their systematic search should be considered in the regulation. Measurement of these fibers in air samples will then make it possible to identify pollution and anticipate health risk.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Boulanger et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.