The Standard – April 2017

As new technologies and applications to study environmental, food, water, and exposure contaminants advance, CIL continues to maintain a leadership role working with researchers to develop new standards to meet the latest needs. With new instrumentation and extraction procedures allowing detection limits approaching attogram levels in some cases, the need for highly accurate isotope standards has never been greater. In this catalog, you will find approximately 600 new standards for legacy and emerging compounds to supplement our existing stable isotope-labeled and authentic standards.

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" had a large impact on the way ordinary citizens viewed a widespread class of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) known as organochlorine (OC) pesticides, and encouraged environmental and public health professionals to scrutinize POPs much more than before.  

On July 10, 1976, an explosion at the ICMESA chemical plant released a thick, white cloud that quickly settled on the town of Seveso in northern Italy. In the cloud was 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD or dioxin), a highly toxic material. First, animals began to die. Four days later, people began to feel ill effects – nausea, blurred vision, and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of chloracne. It wasn’t until weeks later that the town itself was evacuated. Thousands of animals in the contaminated area died, and many thousands more were slaughtered to prevent TCDD from entering the food chain.¹

Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate insecticide, acaricide, and miticide used to control foliage growth and soil-borne insects. The use of chlorpyrifos as a pesticide began in 1965. It has been predominately used on corn crops, but it has also been used on numerous row crops and fruit and nut trees. Studies show chlorpyrifos is relatively hydrophobic and binds strongly to soil particles. The major metabolite, 3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinol (TCPy), is moderately persistent and mobile in soil as a result of weak binding to soil particles.