Distribution of thallium in environmental media and its analytical methods

The thallium content is low in environmental media such as water,soil,minerals and rocks,organisms and human bodies.However,serious environmental pollution is caused by thallium due to such human factors as mining of thallium deposits and utilization of thallium.The thallium content in polluted areas is dozens of times,hundreds of times and even ten thousands of times higher than the background value.In order to monitor and control thallium pollution in the environment ,the analytic technique must be improved.The authors suggest that high sensitive and simple analytic techniques such as the inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer(ICP-MS )should be extensively adopted besides the traditional atomic absorption spectrometry(AAS )and spectrophotometry.