Ammerman et al. 1977 - contaminants in animal mineral supplements

Ammerman and coauthors reviewed contaminating elements in feed-grade mineral supplements used for domestic animals. The strongest HMI-relevant primary data are example analyses of micro-mineral supplement materials, especially Table 2’s Pb, As, Cd, Al, and Hg entries. These values are supply-chain context for livestock-derived foods, not finished meat, poultry, milk, or dairy occurrence values.

Key numbers

Table 2 reports toxic elements in feed-grade micro-mineral supplements. Values are preserved as printed in ppm except the narrative statement for mercury in manganese oxide, which is printed as 9 ppb; arsenic and mercury are not speciated, so this page records them as tAs and tHg.

The text summarizes Table 2 by stating that Pb and As in manganese oxide samples varied from 660 to 2,180 ppm and 119 to 1,400 ppm, respectively. It states that zinc oxide supplements contained as much as 3% or 30,000 ppm Pb, 2 to 149 ppm As, and 170 to 1,290 ppm Cd; adding 60 ppm Zn to a diet with the high-Pb zinc oxide would also add 3 ppm Pb to the diet.

Table 3 is less cleanly extractable in the PDF text, but the narrative reports that toxic elements in phosphate supplements such as Al, Pb, and As were present at relatively low levels, while vanadium varied from 90 to 140 ppm in three phosphate samples and reached 1,100 and 1,400 ppm in phosphates from one localized area.

Secondary tissue-carryover context in the review should be kept separate from the supplement-composition table:

• Lambs consuming up to 500 ppm Pb for 84 days had muscle Pb no more than .2 ppm dry matter, or about .06 ppm wet tissue; lamb liver and kidney contained 5.3 and 9.4 ppm Pb dry matter at 100 ppm Pb in the diet, converted by the authors to about 1.6 and 2.8 ppm Pb wet tissue.
• Slaughter-animal pork and beef kidney/liver and poultry liver in Canada ranged from .46 to 1.77 ppm Pb, presumably wet tissue basis, below a Canadian Pb tolerance of 2 ppm.
• Lambs consuming 15 ppm Cd for 4 months had muscle Cd of 90 ppb wet tissue basis; milk of cows exposed to natural Cd contamination contained 3 ppb Cd.
• Canadian slaughter-animal kidney/liver samples ranged from nondetectable (~.01 ppm Hg) to .097 ppm Hg wet tissue; cow’s milk was reported to range from 3 to 10 ppb Hg.
• For arsenic, acutely poisoned cattle had liver values of 5.5 to 60 ppm As and muscle As averaging 8.8 ppm; cattle consuming 1.25 ppm dietary As for 8 weeks had muscle As of .2 ppm and all tissue concentrations 1 ppm or less.

Methods (brief)

This is a review paper with example composition tables. The authors state that Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3 data are examples, that rather complete analyses on individual supplement samples were limited, and that each Table 2 line represents one sample only. Table 2 values are attributed to Watson et al. for manganese compounds, Ammerman et al. for iron carbonates, and unpublished International Minerals and Chemical Corporation data for iron oxides, zinc oxides, and copper oxide. No uniform sampling frame, analytical method, or market denominator is reported for Table 2.

Implications

The paper documents a plausible livestock supply-chain pathway: feed-grade mineral supplements can carry substantial Pb, tAs, Cd, Al, tHg, or V impurities depending on mineral source and processing history. These supplement values should not be entered as finished-food occurrence concentrations. They can support source-pathway notes for meat-and-poultry and milk-and-dairy pages, especially where later livestock-product papers discuss feed or mineral supplements as exposure sources.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• meat-and-poultry
• milk-and-dairy
• lead
• arsenic-total
• cadmium
• aluminum
• mercury-total
• vanadium

Verification notes

• Identity checks before writing found no existing source page for the title, first author, raw handle MFK_ammerman1977, or cite key ammerman1977-mineral-supplements-contaminants.
• Source scope: supply-chain context for domestic-animal feed mineral supplements. products: [] is intentional because the current closed taxonomy has no livestock feed-grade mineral-supplement product row; the closest human and pet supplement rows would mis-route the matrix.
• Slug note: no exact animal-feed-mineral-supplements product or ingredient slug exists in the taxonomy snapshot. Frontmatter uses downstream livestock ingredient pages (meat-and-poultry, milk-and-dairy) and descriptive matrix terms.
• All Table 2 values above were rechecked against /tmp/hmi-june9-077.txt extracted with pdftotext -layout. The 9 ppb Hg statement is from the narrative immediately below Table 2, not a separate row in the rendered table.
• Speciation check: As and Hg are not speciated in Table 2 or the summary text; they are recorded as tAs and tHg. The review discusses methylmercury in secondary toxicology examples, but no feed-grade supplement MeHg occurrence value is reported.
• Units and basis are preserved as printed (ppm, ppb, dry matter, wet tissue, or wet tissue basis where stated). No values were converted or normalized.
• Brand firewall: the table footnote names a data contributor, not sampled brands; no commercial source is tied to a contamination value.

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.