National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

“ Samples of blood and tissue collected from humans pose a real health risk to laboratory workers who collect and handle these samples. These risks are primarily due to personal contact with infective biological samples and can have serious health consequences, such as infectious hepatitis, and other diseases. There is also some risk from the chemical content of these samples, but this is much less. Those who handle blood and tissue specimens should wear protective gloves, and avoid aerosolization of the samples. ”

“ Calibrate the spectrometer according to manufacturer's recommendations. NOTE: Typically, an acid blank and 10 μg/mL multielement solutions are used. Analyze a standard for every ten samples. Check measurement recoveries for all elements of interest with at least three spiked, unexposed samples or with reference materials of known elemental composition. These quality control samples should constitute 15 to 20% of all samples analyzed. NOTE: For blood or tissue spikes, split a control sample and spike one fraction. ”

“ Correct all samples for this measurement recovery. This is especially important for blood samples because routine interelement corrections will not adequately compensate for the high levels of iron present, which has numerous spectral emission wavelengths.
MEASUREMENT: 12. 13.
Set the spectrometer to conditions specified by the manufacturer. Analyze standards and samples. NOTE: If the values for the samples are above the range of the standards, dilute the sample solutions with 10% H 2SO 4, reanalyze, and apply the appropriate dilution factor in calculations. ”