Human hair as a pollutant dosimeter

Human hair has been proved to be a better dosimeter than even blood for tracing most of the heavy metal toxins when they penetrate the biosphere. The high precision of the neutron activation analysis (NAA) enabled researchers to elegantly differentiate between endogenous and exogenous contamination and thoroughly study poisonings caused by these physiologically-unimportant elements. Extensive volume of bench-scale work has been accomplished in these laboratories to show the capacity of INAA to detect the presence of 10 nuclides (or more) with a precision of about 5%. The principal objective of the present study is to employ this assaying power and the tendency of scalp hair to uptake heavy metals from aqueous solutions, to design a dosimeter which can easily be used by the environmentalists. The findings should also be of interest to the waste-management people who are searching for a cost-effective technique to remove these pollutants from relatively large volumes of industrial effluents