Blood lead monitoring in Italy: Assessment of the quality of results obtained between 1992 and 1994

Between 1992 and 1994, a new screening campaign for blood Pb monitoring in the Italian general population was carried out. Since the first campaign (started in 1978, in accomplishment of the European Community Directive 77/312/EEC) a working group of the Laboratory of Clinical Biochemistry at the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità), as the Reference Centre (RC), has coordinated the activity of various laboratories spread over the national territory. Appropriate quality assurance procedures, including an external quality assessment scheme (EQAS), were elaborated. Within the EQAS, three or four trials were carried out every year. Each laboratory participating in the trial analyzed eight control samples prepared from cow blood at different Pb concentrations. The results obtained by each peripheral laboratory and the RC between 1992 and 1994 have been compared by regression analysis. The same statistical method was adopted to compare the results obtained by each peripheral laboratory and the RC in the duplicate analysis of about 10 per cent of the human samples collected during the 1992–1994 monitoring campaign. There was no evidence of systematic differences between the regression lines obtained on control and human samples. In spite of the lower Pb concentration in the control samples analyzed during the 1992–1994 campaign, the analytical performance of the laboratories was better than that obtained in the previous screening campaign (1985–1986). Blood Pb levels observed in human samples collected between 1992 and 1994, confirm the downward time trend observed in the campaigns carried out in 1978–1979, 1980–1981 and 1985–1986. This study confirms that the results obtained in an EQAS are representative of the actual performance in the analysis of real (human) samples.