It was reported that, in the United States, the PAHs exposure through food consumptions accounted for 96% for the aged 19�C50 nonsmokers [15]. In Montreal, sellekchem Canada, the children’s exposure to PAHs through food consumptions accounted for 93% to 97% [16]. However, in Tianjin, China, populations’ exposure to PAHs through dietary intake, respiratory, and skin contact accounted approximately for 75%, 20%, and 5% of the total exposure, respectively [1]. These reports suggest that dietary intake is a predominant route of PAHs exposure to harm human health. Because fish plays a key role in the food chain in comparison to other types of food media of PAHs intake such as vegetables [17], it is a primary intermediary through which these pollutants access the human body, even though fish only constitutes approximately ten percent of the dietary intake of humans [18].
Therefore, the residual level of PAHs in fish, and particularly in edible fish, has a great effect on human health. This paper will estimate the content of PAHs in various tissues and organs of four commonly found edible fish species at the Beijing market. These fish tissues and organs, although not all harvested by all peoples across the world, are all ingested by the Chinese people to a larger or smaller extent, according to the dietary habit. In addition, we will show how the content is distributed in the tissues and organs of the fish and how it is distributed across the various species that we are studying. We will also discuss the potential risks for human health through an analysis of wet weight contents and lipid-normalized contents.
2. Materials and Methods2.1. Sample Collection50 specimens from each of four commonly consumed freshwater fish species, namely, crucian carp (Carassius auratus), bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis), carp (Cyprinus carpio L), and grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idellus) were collected from the Yuegezhuang wholesale market, which is Cilengitide the largest aquatic product market in the Beijing region. Five tissues and organs from these specimens, including the brain, liver, bladder, roe, and a muscle mixture from the dorsal and chest were sampled. To eliminate individual diversity, tissues from five specimens of each species were combined into one sample. All of the samples were freeze-dried for three to four days after weighing and then preserved in the desiccator prior to analysis. The general physiological information of the fish is shown in Table 1.