Preliminary study on the distribution of metals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including perfluoroalkylated acids (PFAS), in the aquatic environment near Morogoro, Tanzania, and the potential health risks for humans

Bioaccumulation, Biodistribution, Toxicology and Biomonitoring of Organofluorine Compounds in Aquatic Organisms

“…In fact, in addition to exposure linked to contamination of the physical environment (air, water, soil), the direct ingestion of a contaminated food significantly increases the assimilation of the pollutant [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. For humans, other routes of PFAS intake are possible through direct exposure to the polluted environment (e.g., inhalation of dust or atmospheric particulate from industrial sources) [38,[47][48][49][50][51][52] in addition to the ingestion of contaminated beverages and food, including wild and farmed seafood [1,[53][54][55]. For instance, a very recent study based in Tanzania has reported a PFAS contamination level in fish and seafood that would expose humans up to a threefold amount of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), with respect to the tolerable dose, under the regular fish consumption regimen of 0.016-0.027 kg/capita/day [55].…”

“…For humans, other routes of PFAS intake are possible through direct exposure to the polluted environment (e.g., inhalation of dust or atmospheric particulate from industrial sources) [38,[47][48][49][50][51][52] in addition to the ingestion of contaminated beverages and food, including wild and farmed seafood [1,[53][54][55]. For instance, a very recent study based in Tanzania has reported a PFAS contamination level in fish and seafood that would expose humans up to a threefold amount of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), with respect to the tolerable dose, under the regular fish consumption regimen of 0.016-0.027 kg/capita/day [55]. A similar study, taking into account the contamination of flathead mullet (Mugil cephalus), Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus), and European plaice (Pleuronectes Platessa), hake (Merluccius merluccius), and sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), has reported PFAS contamination levels that were above the tolerable daily intake for toddlers' diet in Italy [56].…”

Chemical pollution as a driver of biodiversity loss and potential deterioration of ecosystem services in Eastern Africa: A critical review

“…51 Pesticides may also represent a serious threat to human health, especially via food consumption. Based on the results obtained by investigating the aquatic environment near Morogoro, Groffen et al 52 have recently pointed out the risk to human health from eating shrimp and fish daily. Indeed, according to the quality guidelines and standard values, exceeding concentrations of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutantsincluding copper, zinc, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid -have been found in both invertebrate and vertebrate aquatic species.…”

“…Indeed, according to the quality guidelines and standard values, exceeding concentrations of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutantsincluding copper, zinc, and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid -have been found in both invertebrate and vertebrate aquatic species. 52 Mdegela et al 53 reported evidence of environmental contamination in sewage effluents in Morogoro by using the wild African sharptooth fish (Clarias gariepinus) as a model, but only heavy metals were detected. In 2016, Omwenga et al 54 assessed the impact of pesticides on Oreochromis niloticus, a fish commonly used in aquaculture and reared in Kiambu and Machakos Counties, Kenya.…”

New Pollution Challenges in Groundwater and Wastewater Due to COVID-19

“…Several approaches have been adapted to decontaminate polluted aquatic environments from HMs and organic pollutants (Ajiboye et al 2021) using techniques such as biochar , nano zero valent iron (Sliječpević et al 2021), and clays (Elshazly et al 2019). Other pollutants may cause serious threats to human health and ecosystems when they reach aquatic environments, including nanoparticles (Turan et al 2019;Souza et al 2021), antibiotics Xu et al 2021), microplastics (Ma et al 2020;Tang et al 2020;Pan et al 2021;Wang et al 2021), bisphenols Šauer et al 2021), retinoic acids (Yeung et al 2020), perfluoroalkylated acids (Groffen et al 2021), heavy metals (Aitta et al 2019;Karaouzas et al 2021), personal care products Lu et al 2021), antineoplastic agents (Yadav et al 2021) and COVID-19 (Kumar et al 2020a;Steffan et al 2020;Lachrich et al 2021). On the other hand, during lockdowns to combat COVID-19, the quality of surface water (Yunus et al 2020) and air (Guatam, 2020) are expected to improve.…”