Chlorinated dioxins and furans have been cited by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as harmful and potentially harmful constituents (HPHC) in tobacco smoke. It is the only constituent on the FDA list which is not a specific compound rather it refers to a sub-group of compounds consisting of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDD) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDF). By convention they are usually referred to by the generic term ‘dioxins’. They are anthropogenic chemicals and are formed from combustion/incineration and manufacturing processes. The World Health Organisation (WHO) have defined 17 dioxin congeners as significantly toxic and adopted a system of reporting the total toxic equivalence (TEQ) based on the mass of each component multiplied by a toxic equivalence factor (TEF). The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set a threshold for safe dioxin exposure at 0.7 pg TEQ/kg body weight per day.

This presentation will demonstrate a clean-up procedure using the Supelco Dioxin Prep System, developed by Maeoka et al.^[1], followed by analysis using gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS). Dioxins were not detected (<4.3 pg TEQ/cig) in Kentucky and CORESTA reference cigarettes under ISO 3308 and Health Canada Intense (HCI) smoking conditions. Transfer rates were evaluated by spiking 500 pg of each component into the tobacco rod and collecting the smoke condensate on a Cambridge filter (CF) pad. Reproducible measurements were obtained with recoveries of 4% to 11% (ISO) and 9 to 27% (HCI). Recoveries of the ¹³C isotope labelled internal standards were between 74.5% and 125.7%.

[1] Maeoka M., Inoue I., Shimono H., Morita N., 2002, Quick Pretreatment Prep Study for Dioxin Analysis. 11th Symposium on Japan Environmental Chemistry (June 3-5), 521- 532.