Workshop on the X-ray fluorescence of lead in bone: conclusions, recommendations and summary

A workshop on the use of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to noninvasively measure lead in bone was convened by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Environmental Health Sciences Center of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The impetus for the workshop stemmed partly from NIEHS' concern that XRF machines produced for this purpose are licensed by the Food and Drug Administration as research devices, a designation that indicates they are safe to use on people but says nothing about the precision and accuracy of the data they generate. Therefore, a major purpose of the workshop was to scientifically examine these issues in a multi-disciplinary setting, to explore the current status of XRF research employing two different XRF techniques for lead-bone measurements: K-shell and L-shell XRF spectroscopy (K-XRF, L-XRF) and to make recommendations for future research in these techniques.