CombiSimilarity, an innovative method to compare environmental and health data sets with different attribute sizes example: Eighteen Organochlorine Pesticides in soil and human breast milk samples

• Contamination of soil and breast milk with Organochlorine Pesticides.
• Organochlorine Pesticides and their impact on the environment and human health.
• Data analysis using the Hasse diagram technique.
• Similarity analysis between soil and breast milk contamination.
• Conformity of soil breast milk contamination detected by CombiSimilarity software tool.

Human health and the health of the environment have entwined. In this paper we underpin this position by presenting a modeling approach named CombiSimilarity, which has been developed by the first author in the software tool PyHasse comprising a wide variety of partial ordering tools. A case study of 18 Organochlorine Pesticides (OCPs) detected in soil as well as in human breast milk samples in the Taurus Mountains in Turkey is carried out. Seven soil samples and 44 breast milk samples were measured. We seek to answer the question whether the contamination pattern in breast milk is associated with the contamination pattern in soil by studying the mutual quantitative relationships of the chemicals involved. We could demonstrate that there is a similarity with respect to the concentration profiles between the soil and breast milk pollution. Therefore the hypothesis may be formulated that the concentrations of chemicals in the milk samples are strongly related to the soil contamination. This supports the concept that soil could be a surrogate for human exposure at background locations.