Measurement of Chlorinated Dioxins and Furans in Cigarette Mainstream Smoke

Chlorinated dioxins and furans (‘dioxins’) are not ordinarily detected in cigarette smoke at levels likely to exceed the recommended ‘safe’ limits recognised by health and environmental protection agencies. By convention they are measured in terms of their total toxic equivalence (TEQ). The method developed by this group utilises high sensitivity gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GCMS/ MS). The limit of detection (LOD) was determined to be 4.3 pg TEQ/cig; under ISO 3308 smoking conditions. Dioxins are not subject to any routine regulatory control in cigarette smoke. However, certain dioxin congeners are highly toxic and they have been cited by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as harmful and potentially harmful constituents (HPHC) of tobacco smoke. This raises the issue of how to monitor and measure uncertainty when the analyte(s) of interest are not normally present in the matrix of interest. In the absence of a reference cigarette containing levels of dioxins above the detection limit; we prepared test pieces containing known quantities of 17 dioxin congeners, regarded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as significantly toxic. This paper provides data for the transfer rates performed under ISO 3308 (ISO) and Health Canada Intense (HCI) machinesmoking conditions; and proposes a means to estimate the uncertainty (U) based on TEQ. [Beitr. Tabakforsch. Int. 26 (2015) 214-218]