Abou Abbass et al. 2023 — Drinking-water metals in Beirut and Mount Lebanon

Abou Abbass et al. analyzed 79 drinking-water samples from Beirut and Mount Lebanon for chemical and microbiological quality. The metal results are routeable as broad drinking-water context for total arsenic and total mercury, but the paper does not provide a bottled-water-only subset, so it should not be treated as a clean bottled-water benchmark distribution by itself.

Key numbers

• Sample frame: 79 drinking-water samples from Beirut and Mount Lebanon, collected in 2 L polyethylene bottles for chemical analysis and separate sterile containers for microbiology.
• Arsenic: reported maximum 0.17 ppm at Corniche El Mazraa 2; reported mean 0.07791 ppm in Table 5. The text also states 0.007 ppm, creating a decimal-place discrepancy; this page preserves the table value and flags the conflict below.
• The authors state that 76 percent of sites exceeded the paper’s referenced arsenic limit of 0.05 ppm.
• Mercury: reported maximum 0.002 ppm at 24 sites across 12 regions; mean 0.0009 ppm and standard deviation 0.0006 ppm. The authors state that 23 percent of sites exceeded the accepted value of 0.001 ppm.
• Sodium and calcium were also summarized: sodium ranged from 0.61 ppm to 2195.22 ppm with a reported mean of 129.3 ppm; calcium ranged from 0.61 ppm to 612.85 ppm with a reported mean of 105.4 ppm.
• Microbiology context: the paper reports microbial contamination in 60.76 percent of samples, total coliform in 46 percent, fecal coliform in 33 percent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa in 30 percent, and E. coli in 39 percent.

Methods (brief)

The chemical analysis used ICP-OES with an ultrasonic nebulizer after membrane filtration. The paper names sodium, arsenic, mercury, and calcium as the chemical variables exceeding accepted or international standards in descriptive analysis. The metal species are not speciated; arsenic and mercury are treated as total arsenic and total mercury.

Implications

Certification: This source is broad drinking-water context for Lebanon, not a bottled-water product benchmark row. It may be useful for geographic variance and source-water risk discussion where bottled and tap drinking-water systems overlap.

Courses: The source is useful for distinguishing product-specific bottled-water evidence from public drinking-water and infrastructure evidence.

App: The paper supports a location-specific water contamination signal, but without product labels or bottled-water subset values.

Microbiome: No microbiome endpoint was measured.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• water
• bottled-drinking-water
• arsenic
• mercury

Verification notes

• The PDF repeatedly discusses pollution in both pipeline and bottled water, but the numeric tables are site-level drinking-water summaries rather than product-labeled bottled-water records. Routing should therefore remain broad drinking-water context unless a later source recovers sample-type rows.
• The arsenic mean is internally inconsistent: the text states 0.007 ppm, while Table 5 gives 0.07791 ppm. The table value is recorded in Key numbers because the table is the structured result field.
• Arsenic and mercury are routed as total species because the ICP-OES method does not provide speciation.

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.