Goal, Scope and Background In order to evaluate the estrogenic activity of sediments and XAD water extracts of selected sites of the catchment area
of the River Neckar, a river system in Southern Germany, an integrative assessment approach was used to assess the ecological
hazard potential of endocrine-disrupting compounds in sediment and water.
Methods The approach is based on estrogen receptor-mediated vitellogenin synthesis induced in isolated hepatocytes of rainbow trout
and quantified in a non-radioactive dot blot/RNAse protection-assay in parallel to comprehensive chemical analyses of estrogenic
substances.
Results and Discussion Numerous investigated extracts revealed an estrogen activity comparable to that of the positive control (1 nM 17?-estradiol
corresponding to 270 ng/L in the test medium). Based on a concentration factor of 30 in the extracts and a recovery of XAD
resins of approximately 80 %, 17?-estradiol equivalent concentrations between 20 and 26.7 ng/L could be calculated downstream
of a sewage treatment plant (< 0.1 ng/L for a reference site). A comparison of the bioassay-derived Bio-TEQs (toxicity equivalents)
and the Chem-TEQs revealed a high correlation with a Pearson coefficient of 0.85, indicating that the same ranking of the
samples could be obtained with respect to the endocrine disrupting potential with both chemical and bioanalytical analysis.
However, the TEQ concentrations computed from chemical analyses were significantly lower than the bioassay-derived TEQ concentrations.
In fact, in none of the samples, more than 14 % of the vitellogenin-inducing potency could be attributed to the substances
(steroids, alkylphenols, bisphenol A, diethylstilbestrol) analyzed.
A comparison of the endocrine disrupting potential of sediments extracted by the solvents acetone and methanol revealed lower
biological effects for acetone-extracted samples. Possible reasons may be a masking of endocrine effects in acetone extracts
by cytotoxicity, a low extraction efficiency of the solvent acetone, or anti-estrogen potencies of some extracted sediment
compounds.
Using a mass balance approach, the contribution of the compounds analyzed chemically (Chem-TEQs) to the total endocrine activity
(Bio-TEQs) was calculated. Based on the very low detection limits, particularly of the steroids with their high TEF factors,
results revealed that a calculation of the Chem-TEQs is associated with considerable scale inaccuracy: Whereas only 7-15 %
of the biological effectiveness (Bio-TEQs) could be explained by endocrine substances identified above the detection limits,
the assumption of concentrations slightly below the given detection limits would result in a significant over estimation (137-197
%) of the Bio-TEQs. Even the interassay variation of the dot blot assay with different fish donors for primary hepatocyte
(factor 2 - 2.5) is relatively low, when compared to the large range of the Chem-TEQ concentrations (factor 20) obtained when
applying different modes of calculation.
Conclusions and Outlook Overall, only a minor portion of the endocrine activity detected by bioassays could be linked to compounds identified by
chemical analysis. In vitro assays for assessment of endocrine activities are useful as sensitive integrating methods that
provide quantitative estimates of the total activity of particular receptor-mediated responses. Although discrepancies may
also result from different bioanalytical approaches, it is overall likely that bioanalytical and not chemical analytical approaches
give the correct estimate of endocrine disrupting potencies in environmental samples. As a conclusion, assessment of endocrine
disruption based on chemical analysis alone does not appear sufficient and further research into the spectrum of substances
with potential endocrine activity as well as into additive or even synergistic effects in complex environmental samples is
urgently needed. 相似文献
Risk management can be defined as coordinated activities to conduct and control an organization with consideration of risk. Recently, risk management strategies have been developed to change the approach to hazards and risks. Resilience as a safety management theory considers the technical and social aspects of systems simultaneously. Resilience in process industries, as a socio-technical system, has four aspects of early detection, error-tolerant design, flexibility, and recoverability. Meanwhile, process industries' resilience has three phases: avoidance, survival, and recovery, determining the transition between normal state, process upset event, and catastrophic event. There may be various technical and social failures such as regulatory and human or organizational items that can lead to upset or catastrophic events. In the avoidance phase, the upset event is predicted, and thus, the system remains in a normal state. For the survival phase, the system state is assumed to be an upset process event, and the system tries to survive through the unhealthy process conditions or remains in the same state, probably with low performance. In the recovery phase, the system is supposed to be catastrophic, and the emergency barriers are prioritized to show the severity of the consequences and response time, leading to a resumption of a normal state. Therefore, a resilience-based network can be designed for process industries to show its inherent dynamic transition in nature. In this study, network data envelopment analysis (DEA), as a mathematical model, is used to evaluate the relative efficiency of the process industries regarding a network transition approach based on the system's internal structure. First, a resilience-based network is designed to consist of three states of normal, upset, and catastrophic events. Then, the efficiency of each industrial department, which is defined as decision-making units (DMUs), is evaluated using network DEA. As a case study, a refinery that is considered a critical process industry is assessed. Using the proposed model shows the efficient and inefficient DMUs in each of three states of normal, upset, and catastrophic events of the process and the projection onto efficient frontiers. Besides calculating the network efficiency, the performance of each state is extracted to precisely differentiate between DMUs. The results of this study, which is one of the fewest cases in the area of performance evaluation of process industries with a network approach, indicated a robust viewpoint for monitoring and assessment of risks. 相似文献
Objective: To reduce the severity of injuries and the number of cyclist deaths in traffic accidents, active safety devices providing cyclist detection are considered to be effective countermeasures. The features of car-to-bicycle collisions need to be known in detail to develop such safety devices.
Methods: The study investigated near-miss situations captured by drive recorders installed in passenger cars. Because similarities in the approach patterns between near-miss incidents and real-world fatal cyclist accidents in Japan were confirmed, we analyzed the 229 near-miss incident data via video capturing bicycles crossing the road in front of forward-moving cars. Using a video frame captured by a drive recorder, the time to collision (TTC) was calculated from the car's velocity and the distance between the car and bicycle at the moment when the bicycle initially appeared.
Results: The average TTC in the cases where bicycles emerged from behind obstructions was shorter than that in the cases where drivers had unobstructed views of the bicycles. In comparing the TTC of car-to-bicycle near-miss incidents to the previously obtained results of car-to-pedestrian near-miss incidents, it was determined that the average TTC in car-to-bicycle near-miss incidents was significantly longer than that in car-to-pedestrian near-miss incidents.
Conclusions: When considering the TTC in the test protocol of evaluation for safety performance of active safety devices, we propose individual TTCs for evaluation of cyclist and pedestrian detections, respectively. In the test protocols, the following 2 scenarios should be employed: bicycle emerging from behind an unobstructed view and bicycle emerging from behind obstructions. 相似文献