Overview
Acho and colleagues ran a food-frequency survey in three Abidjan municipalities and combined it with lead and cadmium levels in farm hen meat and eggs from Abidjan and Agnibilekrou to estimate daily exposure and hazard ratios. The paper states that the contamination levels in its Tables 1 and 2 are those obtained by Acho et al. 2019, the authors’ earlier study, so this paper reprints that occurrence data rather than reporting new measurements. It is therefore recorded as context, and its values are not counted as findings.
Key numbers
- Reprinted chicken meat levels (Table 1): Abidjan lead 0.067 and cadmium 0.302 mg/kg; Agnibilekrou lead 0.060 and cadmium 0.089 mg/kg, with standard-deviation cells printed as ”± 20”, ”± 30” and ”± 70”.
- Reprinted egg levels (Table 2): Abidjan lead “0.067 ± 0.02” and cadmium “25.96 ± 15.24” µg/kg; Agnibilekrou lead “0.35 ± 0.09” and cadmium “35.46 ± 14.04” µg/kg.
- Survey intake (Section 4.1): 160.49 g chicken meat and 77.48 g eggs per person per day; mean body weight 64.19 kg. Estimated daily exposure 0.16 µg/kg bw for lead and 0.47 µg/kg bw for cadmium (Table 4).
Methods (brief)
Graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry; meat digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a microwave system, egg contents dry-ashed at 500 °C. Each digest read three times. No detection limits, certified reference material or recoveries are reported. Risk was characterized by hazard ratios and an excess individual cancer risk.
Evidence Fitness
This is a risk-assessment paper on reprinted data from the authors’ 2019 study, so it should not be counted as an independent occurrence dataset. The paper is internally inconsistent: Table 4 uses chicken meat concentrations (lead 63, cadmium 174.6 µg/kg) and an egg lead value (0.16 µg/kg) that differ from Tables 1 and 2, the meat is called “guinea fowl meat” in the discussion, and the standard deviations in Table 1 are implausible as printed. Collection dates are not reported. Hen meat is a proxy for chicken-broth and egg a proxy for custard; neither thin page is linked.