EVISA Newsletter

Mercury is a global pollutant and mercury pollution is to a great extent caused by manmade activities. Unfortunately due to the environmental cycling, mercury is contaminating also the food web and is creating a health risk for animals and humans. When discussing such health risk, the risk assessment is most often based on the concentration of the pollutant in the raw foodstuff. However, mercury is also transformed during its way into the food web, and the species with highest bioaccumulation factors is methylmercury, a very toxic mercury species, that often is the main mercury species in sea food. However, humans most often eat seafood after some cooking and the question is whether such kitchen preparation might influence the concentration and speciation of mercury. The researchers found no significant mercury transformation during cooking and only the high temperatures applied during roasting and frying led to some mercury loss of 4 to 33% due to evaporation of methylmercury (see the news below).

Such questions related to chemical speciation will be discussed during the European Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry - EWCPS 2015 - taking place February 22 to 26, 2015 in Münster, Germany. More than 600 researchers from all over the globe are expected for this important event. The conference will focus on the major topics in analytical plasma spectrochemistry, such as: fundamentals and instrumentation, sample introduction techniques into plasma, hyphenated techniques using plasma sources for detection, stable isotope analysis, laser ablation and elemental imaging, elemental speciation, applications of plasma spectrometry, quality control and validation methods. While the deadline for submitting regular contributions is already gone, you still can submit abstracts for poster presentations. Do not miss this major event for all those working in the field of trace elemental and speciation analysis !

EWCPS 2015: 16th European Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry.
Date: February 22,2015 - February 26,2015
Location: Münster, Germany
January 31,2015 Submission of abstracts for poster presentations

CANAS 2015: Colloquium Analytische Atomspektroskopie
Date: March 8,2015 - March 10,2015
Location: Leipzig
January 30,2015 Early registration at reduced fee

ANAKON 2015
Date: March 23,2015 - March 26,2015
Location: Graz, Austria
February 27,2015 Submission of abstracts for last minute posters

Please do not hesitate to inform us in case that your conference related to speciation
analysis is missing in our Agenda.