ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, biomonitoring has become a progressively popular tool in the environmental health sciences. There is also profound disagreement about the precise meaning and significance of biomonitoring data, particularly for individual-level health. Aided by biomonitoring data, these studies made a strong case that chemical exposures and risks were perhaps more democratically distributed than had once been assumed. In short, biomonitoring data had become the basis for new discourses and representational practices. At the same time, in policy arenas and scientific circles the availability of biomonitoring and the production of biomonitoring data were also engendering new debates and provoking new lines of inquiry. During the first decade of this century, several states, including California, adopted new legislation to fund the development of statewide biomonitoring programs. Environmental health scientists also integrated biomonitoring into their ongoing investigations of environmental causes of disease.
