The purpose of the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, also called Biomonitoring California, is to:

1. Determine levels of environmental chemicals in a representative sample of Californians
2. Establish trends in the levels of these chemicals over time
3. Help assess the effectiveness of public health efforts and regulatory programs to decrease exposures to specific chemicals.

What is biomonitoring?

Biomonitoring is the measurement of chemicals (or their metabolites) in a person’s body fluids or tissues, such as blood or urine. It tells us the amount of the chemical that actually gets into people from all sources (for example, from air, soil, water, dust, and food) combined. Because of this, biomonitoring can provide useful information on how much exposure to toxic chemicals a person has had.