Analyse des pesticides dans les cheveux: une nouvelle approche pour l’évaluation de l’exposition professionnelle

pesticides. A high number of pesticides are known as endocrine disrupting chemicals or having a supposed or verified carcinogenic effect. These toxic compounds are found in the environment, in water or in food. Once in our organism these molecules can be metabolised or stored. GOALS. In order to measure the impact on human health of gardening activity in Burkina Faso, hair analysis will provide information on the pesticides’ exposition of operators. The evaluation of pesticides exposure risks for human health is usually over estimated when there is only the analysis of environmental matrices (air, water, soil…) As the aim of this project is to understand the impact of gardening activity, the volunteers who participate in this project will be classified into two groups. First, the exposed population considers the operators. Then, the reference population regroups people living in the same area that the population studied, but without being in direct contact with pesticides. This population will be our baseline. In this way, contaminations due to other vectors such as food, water, vector control etc. will not be considered to evaluate the exposition due to gardening. An inovative protocole. The protocol developed, optimised and used for natural samples is inspired from the existing method QuEChERS AOAC 2007.01. This method is used to analyse pesticides in fruits, vegetables or soils samples. The main principle is simple and based on the salting-out effect. Hair pesticides residue analysis are made in GC/MS and LC/MS-MS. REsults. Analysis over 73 volunteers shows a 100% contamination of imidaclorprid in hair. The professional activity impact is observable on the acetamiprid concentration (10 times more in gardener’s population than in the reference population). The exposed population has a mean sum of 2469.3 ng pesticides/ g hair whereas the reference population has a mean sum of 1709.5 ng pesticides/g of hair.