Overview
Adjei and colleagues bought fresh beef muscle, liver and kidney from 30 vendors in three Accra markets and measured arsenic, lead and cadmium by graphite-furnace AAS. Tables report market and tissue means in mg/100g, but the discussion compares the same numbers with mg/kg limits, so the unit is unresolved.
Key numbers
- Beef muscle mean: arsenic 0.35, lead 0.66, cadmium 0.20 “mg/100g” (Table 2).
- Beef liver mean: arsenic 2.40, lead 1.14, cadmium 1.29 “mg/100g” (Table 2).
- Market means: arsenic 2.48 (Ashaiman), 0.85 (Madina), 0.35 (Makola) “mg/100g” (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
Three grams of fresh tissue were digested with nitric and sulfuric acid and read on a graphite tube atomizer AAS, two replicates per sample. No detection limits, blanks, reference materials or recoveries are reported. Means were compared by two-way ANOVA.
Evidence Fitness
A reasonable design (90 tissue samples from three markets), but the printed unit conflicts with the text: taken literally, muscle lead would be 6.6 mg/kg, far above the 1 mg/kg limit the authors say was not exceeded. The abstract also contradicts Table 2 on liver. No µg/kg values are stored. For vegetable-beef-soup this is a proxy: it measures raw market beef, not soup.