Transferability of Blood Lead Determinations by Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry and Continuum Background Correction

We have examined and proved feasible the transfer of a method for blood lead determination, developed and optimized for a Zeeman-corrected instrument, to a con-tinuum-corrected furnace atomic absorption spectro-photometer. Numerous reference materials analyzed with the continuum-corrected instrument gave results within 10 g/L (0.05 mol/L) at low values and varied by <6% at values>200 g/L (0.97 moI/L). Forty-four routine human blood specimens were analyzed by the same method with both continuum- and Zeeman-corrected instrumentation, and gave results that agreed within about the same limits as found with reference materials. The day-to-day precision was about 1/5 the accuracy results. The detection limit was-5 g/L (0.025 mol/L). Indexing Terms: toxicology/Zeeman correction/pyrolysis/electro-thermal atomization/platform atomizatio