Towards Iodine and Lead Determination in Field Settings

Field testing has several advantages including the elimination of sample transportation time and cost, opportunity to educate participants, and rapid determination of remedial action on site. Iodine, an essential micronutrient that is required to be determined at the population level, lacks a field test. The Sandell-Kolthoff urinary iodine reaction is the gold-standard laboratory test whose pretreatment step is not field-friendly. To aid the development of a field test, I completed an interference study, identifying most significant interference from urobilin. Lead is a neurotoxin with major exposure pathways through dust and water but lacks sensitive field screening tests for these matrices. The portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer (XRF) is currently used in the health department gold-standard lead risk assessment (LRA) for determining lead in paint. I have built upon previous work from our lab for deploying the XRF as a screening tool for lead in dust and water, with increased sensitivity and robustness.