Notice of RetractionTotal Mercury and Methyl Mercury Concentration of Hair in the Residents in Di´er Songhua River Region, Northeast China: Influencing Factors and Health Risk

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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In order to investigate whether there were still human health risk from mercury exposure for the populations in the Di´er Songhua River region, a number of 360 hair samples were collected from the residents aged of 1 to 73 and hair total mercury and methyl mercury concentrations were detected by the methods of CVAAS and gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. The average hair total mercury concentrations was 1.82 mg/kg with the range of 0.03 116.634 mg/kg. The mean hair methyl mercury value was 0.619 mg/kg with the range of 0.07-8.15 mg/kg. There are significant passive relationship between the hair total mercury concentrations and the hair methyl mercury concentrations. The hair mercury contents in the subgroups of high frequency fish consumption, drinking alcohol, smoking and hair-dyed were observably higher than those in the control subgroups, respectively. The hair mercury concentrations of 27.26% of the populations, 23.08% of the women of children bearing age and 30% of children were in the excess of RfD set by USEPA, respectively. That fact suggested that there was still mercury health risk for the residents living in the Di´er Songhua River region.