Cyanobacterial toxins: risk management for health protection

Response and recovery of hybrid sturgeon from subchronic oral administration of cyanobacteria

“…Among cyanotoxins, hepatotoxic microcystins (MCs) are the most common and produced by numerous genera, including Microcystis, Planktothrix, Aphanizomenon, Anabaena (Chorus and Bartram, 1999;Figueiredo et al, 2004). These cyanotoxins can pose serious threats to human and environmental health via contamination of drinking water, recreational exposure to waterborne toxins, and possible accumulation of toxins in the food-web (Chorus et al, 2000;Paerl et al, 2001;Codd et al, 2005;Falconer and Humpage, 2006).…”

Rapid quantification of total microcystins in cyanobacterial samples by periodate-permanganate oxidation and reversed-phase liquid chromatography

“…To minimize public exposure to MCs, the World Health Organization has set a provisional guideline value of 1 g L −1 for MCLR in drinking water [12]. Currently, more than 80 different MC variants have been described, and the toxic cyanobacterial strains reported usu-ally produce a mixture of MCs [8,13]. Moreover, the acute toxicity of these MC variants is almost identical to that of MCLR [7].…”

“…The LC method can be much more definitive than bioassays and biochemical methods 0003 since it can provide information for the identification of individual MCs. However, cyanobacterial blooms may contain complex mixtures of MCs and several classes of toxins [13], which makes it difficult to quantify individual MCs in field samples because of the lack of standard materials. Moreover, the efficiency of the techniques employed for MC analysis may be influenced by the method used to extract the toxins from samples.…”

Heavy metal migration and risk transference associated with cyanobacterial blooms in eutrophic freshwater

“…The risk of intoxication from cyanobacteria and their toxins is an important consideration when dealing with water use from harmful algal blooms (Carmichael, 2001). Records in the scientific literature of adverse effects on humans and animals associated with exposure to cyanobacterial cells and their toxic metabolites range from mild to fatal, and are increasing (Codd et al, 2005). Studies on ecotoxicology of cyanobacteria have been largely been associated with drinking and recreational water because there is an ever-increasing need for data from epidemiological research on the health effects of exposure to cyanobacteria (Falconer and Humpage, 2005).…”