New Aspects of Ecotoxicology through a Systemic Approach

Shows how the essential ecotoxicological question of constructing a quantitative model of the interactions between environmental stress factors, and their synergistic effects resulting in a biosystem's perturbation, even in its pathology, has been formulated from a systemic viewpoint. The proposed model has been developed on the basis of the multicorrelational structure of heavy‐metal concentrations in the blood of pregnant women with a high environmental exposure to those metals. The proposed model uses an original notion of the interaction which allows one to find and explain the observed connection between the phenomenon of spontaneous abortion as an environmentally induced foetal pathology and some heavy metals, particularly cadmium and lead.