ABSTRACT
The amount entering the body through the skin is considerable when the skin is in direct contact with a solvent in liquid form, but negligible when the skin is exposed to air containing solvent vapors. In most cases, the dermal uptake amounts to less than a few percent of the respiratory uptake. The main routes by which a living body eliminates absorbed organic solvents are urinary and pulmonary excretion. Generally, a large percentage of an absorbed solvent undergoes metabolic degradation to be excreted in urine and a smaller portion is eliminated unchanged through the pulmonary route. In most toxicokinetic models proposed so far for organic solvents, the body is generally divided into several tissue groups with respect to the solubility of vapors in each tissue and the rate of blood perfusion through the tissue. Pharmacokinetic behavior of trichloroethylene was simulated using this spreadsheet program on a personal computer.
