Triclosan: Reviews of its Environmental and Health Effects and a Detection and Quantification Analytical Method

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

McCord, Elzie

Keywords

Triclosan, SPME, Health, Environment

Area of Concentration

Biology

Abstract

Triclosan is a ubiquitous chemical with possibly profound impacts on the environment and in medicine. It adversely affects aquatic and terrestrial organisms and is linked to antibiotic resistance. This chemical can be found in a wide variety of consumer products, such as soap, toothpaste, toys, athletic equipment, and kitchen cutting boards. Triclosan is a polychloro-phenoxy phenol, IUPAC name: 5-chloro-2-(2,4- dichlorophenoxy)phenol. Triclosan has several known metabolites, including a dioxin (Aranami & Readman 2006) and two (2,4-DCP and 2,4,6-TCP) (Canosa et al. 2005) that are acutely toxic and are listed as probable carcinogens (CDC 1997, CDC 1998). Triclosan has profound effects on the environment, both aquatic and terrestrial. It may interfere with agriculture (Liu et al. 2009) and kill or mutate aquatic life (Harada et al. 2008). It flows down the drain when hands are washed, toothpaste is discarded (EWG 2009), and other products have been utilized. These sources are diverted to waste treatment plants here some quantity of triclosan is removed from waste water. Triclosan kills bacteria by inhibiting enoyl (acyl carrier protein) reductase and may have the same or similar effects on enoyl (ACP) reductase in plants. Aquatic organisms such as microalgae and invertebrates can be killed by doses of ng/L concentration. Studies in vertebrates have found that it inhibits pregnancy functional hormones (James et al. 2009) and testosterone (Chen et al. 2007), and decrease testicular weight in rats (Kumar et al. 2009). Triclosan also may adversely impact human health. It can do this by acting as a contributor to the hygiene hypothesis (Mullooly et al. 2007). In non-lethal doses, bacteria can become resistant to it, and some bacteria show a triclosan-linked cross resistance to several common antibiotics (Schweizer et al. 2001). The method of Canosa et al. (2005) was reviewed and duplicated in the laboratory. Their methods used solid phase microextraction in combination with gas chromatography — mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to detect and quantify triclosan. My findings moderately supported Canosa et al. (2005); however procedural and statistical discrepancies arose. Variability increased to nearly three times the published values, possibly due to due to operator error, published descriptions, GC-MS column type, or experimental conditions. Linearity of the standard curve was excellent (R2 = .9834). Since raw data were not presented in the published work, direct comparisons of this data pool could not be used to determine method discrepancies. Overall, extraction, detection, and quantitation of triclosan using SPME were successful.

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