Subsurface damage (SSD), especially photoactive impurities, degrades the performance of high energy optics by reduction in the laser induced damage threshold. As the polishing defects are trace content and lie beneath the surface, they are difficult to detect. We herein present a biological method to measure impurities on polished fused silica, based on the intense inhibiting ability about trace level of ceria on enzyme activity. And the enzyme activity is measured in the individual etching solutions of a sequential etching process. Results show that detectability of the biological method satisfies the needs of trace impurity detection with low cost and simple apparatus. Furthermore ceria can be used to tag SSD in lapped and polished optics.