Applications of Chemometrics tools as innovative analytical method development for assessing occupational exposure to hazardous chemical

Healthy working environments are ensured by workplace surveillance, which requires to monitor factors that could potentially affect workers’ health, such as exposure to hazardous substances, and by being compliant with safety and health standards in the working settings. These monitoring programmes must be assisted by robust and sensitive analytical methods able to quantify with precision the amount of hazardous chemicals present in a specific workplace. In some case, this task could be challenging due to the complexity of the analytes to be determined and the matrices in which they are collected, and thus it could require time and resources consuming. The aim of this research project is to develop, through an innovative approach, namely chemometrics, new analytical methods for assessing occupational exposure to hazardous substances. The application of chemometric tools to analytical method development allows to design and/or select optimal procedures and experiments which provide maximum chemical information, reducing the number of experiments and the amount of resources necessary to build an analytical method, which agree with the principles of Green Analytical Chemistry. The results collected during the research activity exploited at the Occupational and Environmental Hygiene and Toxicology Laboratory of the University of Florence are hereby presented. The first part of the work focuses on the risks associated with healthcare personnel exposure to antiblastic drugs and the relative development of analytical methods able to monitor surface contamination due to these cytotoxic agents. While the second one outlines the application of chemometrics to method optimization for the assessment of workers’ exposure to different hazardous volatile chemicals, such as formaldehyde, anhydrides, cumene, flame retardants, and volatile organic compounds. Each argument is briefly introduced highlighting the concerns due to workers’ risk exposure and the relative experimental studies performed during the research activity are presented.