Abdullah 2009 — Pb, Cd, Zn, Al in three commercial fish sauces by ICP-OES (Malaysia, B.Sc. thesis)

An undergraduate B.Sc. (Hons.) Chemistry final-year project at Universiti Teknologi MARA (Shah Alam, Selangor) measured lead, cadmium, zinc, and aluminium in three commercial fish-sauce samples coded sample A, sample B, and sample C by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Sample C is reported by the abstract to have the highest aluminium (36.39 mg/kg) and the lowest zinc (13.18 mg/kg) of the three samples but its lead and cadmium concentrations are not stated in the abstract. The methods chapter and the results-and-discussion chapter (Chapters 3 and 4) are not present in the copy of the PDF under review (the raw file in raw/manual-fetch/Kimi_Agent_Download Corruption Issue/ is truncated to 5 of the original 24 pages); the page below records only what the abstract states verbatim and explicitly disclaims values that the abstract does not state.

The abstract reports that all three samples exceeded the Malaysian Food Regulation 1985 cadmium permitted level of 1 mg/kg by a wide margin (27.46 mg/kg, 36.57 mg/kg, and an unreported Sample C value). The reported Cd and Pb concentrations are an order of magnitude higher than peer-reviewed fish-sauce baselines elsewhere in the corpus; the values are recorded here as the abstract states them, with a data-integrity flag noting that the basis (digest-solution vs as-purchased sauce) cannot be confirmed without the missing methods chapter.

Key numbers

Per-sample concentrations reported in the abstract (units: mg/kg as stated by the source; basis not specified in the abstract — the methods chapter is not present in the PDF copy under review):

The abstract describes sample A as containing “the highest lead, cadmium, and zinc content” and “the lowest [aluminium]” (4.10 mg/kg). Sample C is described as containing “the highest amount of aluminium (36.39 mg/kg) and lowest amount of zinc (13.18 mg/kg).” The abstract does not give numerical Pb or Cd values for sample C; whether sample C is higher or lower than sample B for those analytes cannot be inferred without the results chapter.

Regulatory comparison stated by the abstract: the abstract states that all three samples exceeded the cadmium permitted level of 1 mg/kg in the Malaysian Food Regulation 1985. By the values the abstract does report, sample A exceeds 1 mg/kg Cd by ~37×, sample B by ~27×.

Methods

Analytical instrument: inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), per the abstract.

The methods chapter (Chapter 3 — sample digestion, standard solution preparation, ICP-OES instrument settings, calibration, replicate count, recovery/QA-QC) is not present in the copy of the PDF under review. The Table of Contents (page iv of the thesis) lists these subsections (3.1 Materials; 3.2 Methods covering 3.2.1 Sample digestion, 3.2.2 Standard solution, 3.2.3 Determination of heavy metals) on pages 17–18, but the PDF in raw/manual-fetch/Kimi_Agent_Download Corruption Issue/condiments2_papers/03_Condiments/11_Fish_sauce_heavy_metals_Malaysia.pdf ends at page 5 (Chapter 1 Introduction, second page). Recovery against certified reference material, digest dilution factor, and the as-consumed vs digest-solution basis of the reported mg/kg values therefore cannot be confirmed from this copy.

Speciation

No speciation. Pb, Cd, Zn, and Al are reported as total element only. The abstract does not address oxidation state.

Quality control

Not reported in the available text (abstract only). The methods chapter would normally document CRM recovery, calibration curve quality, and replicate RSD; that chapter is not present in the available copy.

Implications

This page records what the abstract of a 2009 UiTM B.Sc. final-year project states about three coded fish-sauce samples. The page does not draw category-level conclusions about Malaysian fish-sauce contamination from n=3 coded samples — that is Part 9 synthesis work that should be done together with the peer-reviewed fish-sauce sources already in the corpus (Rodriguez et al. 2009 on As speciation, Diviš et al. 2020 on Hg) rather than from this single undergraduate thesis. The order-of-magnitude gap between this paper’s per-sample Cd (27–37 mg/kg) and the peer-reviewed fish-sauce baseline (typically below 0.1 mg/kg in marketed product) is itself the load-bearing observation: either the matrix is genuinely unusual, or the methodology has an issue that the missing chapter would have to explain. Until the full thesis text is recovered, this paper should be treated as a lead, not as a contributor to a synthesis percentile.

Verification notes

• PDF source provenance: file resides in raw/manual-fetch/Kimi_Agent_Download Corruption Issue/condiments2_papers/03_Condiments/; the parent folder name explicitly identifies this batch as a Kimi-agent download corruption issue. The PDF is 5 pages (pdfinfo confirms Pages: 5) versus the 24-page structure documented in the Table of Contents (List of Tables on page v, References on page 24). The available 5 pages cover title, table of contents, abstract, and the first two pages of Chapter 1 — sufficient to capture the abstract’s per-sample numbers and stated method (ICP-OES), insufficient to verify the methods chapter, results-and-discussion narrative, replicate count, or CRM recovery.
• Cite-key construction: abdullah2009-fish-sauce-malaysia-heavy-metals — first author surname + year + matrix + jurisdiction + topic. Distinct from abdullahi2019-fruits-vegetables-heavy-metals (different author, different paper).
• Author name: the title page reads “INTAN SAFINAZ BT ABDULLAH” (BT = “binti”, Malay matronymic). Cite-key uses the patronymic-style surname “Abdullah” per standard Malaysian authorial convention in academic indexing.
• Brand firewall (Part 12): the abstract codes the three samples as A/B/C and does not name brands. No brand-name redaction was required.
• Wiki/HMTc firewall (Part 2): no HMTc threshold proposals, no comparison to certification values, no consumer translation. The Malaysian Food Regulation 1985 Cd ceiling of 1 mg/kg is reported as the abstract states it — as the regulatory comparator the author used — not as a wiki-endorsed threshold.
• Taxonomy choices: ingredients/fish + ingredients/seafood and products/condiments-general follow the precedent set by rodriguez2009-fish-sauce-arsenic-speciation.md in the same KADC folder; fish-sauce is recorded only as a matrices: token (no ingredients/fish-sauce or products/fish-sauce slugs in the live taxonomy as of 2026-06-02). The matrices: [fish-sauce, fermented-fish-condiment, condiment] mirrors the rodriguez2009 pattern.
• Metals frontmatter: Pb, Cd, Zn, Al — the four elements the abstract names. Zn and Al are nutritionally essential / non-HMTc-panel elements but are recorded because the source measured them.
• Evidence tier: C (not B) because the source is an undergraduate B.Sc. thesis without peer review, with n=3, and because the methods/results chapters that would normally support a tier-B grading are not available in the PDF copy under review. The implausibly high per-sample Cd and Pb values relative to peer-reviewed baselines are flagged in tier_rationale and in ## Implications rather than silently averaged into any downstream synthesis.
• Sample C Pb and Cd values are not reported in the abstract. The Key numbers table records “not stated in abstract” for both rather than guessing from the relative-rank language (“highest aluminium, lowest zinc”). The full Chapter 4 results table would have these values.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.