Determination of polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs) in biological tissues with special emphasis on QC/QA measures

This paper gives an overview on the determination of PBDEs in biological tissues, such as human blood and milk, cow's milk and fish with special emphasis on quality control and assurance measures which are mandatory and a prerequisite for a reliable determination of environmental pollutants at trace levels. First experiences in the determination of PBDEs have been gained nearly 20 years ago. Due to great progress in the development of analytical instrumentation, the applied GC/MS methods resulted in very low detection limits. Furthermore, because of unexpected findings in biological tissues, the determination of PBDEs became of growing importance in the past few years. The analysis of hundreds of samples demonstrated the need for extensive quality control/quality assurance (QC/QA) measures which will be reported in detail in the following.