Arsenic risk assessment through dairy products ingestion

Overview

Arellano and colleagues measured total arsenic in raw milk, commercial milk, powdered milk, infant formula, and cheese from Argentina, then estimated arsenic intake and target risk for infants, children, pregnant consumers, and adults. The chapter is occurrence evidence for total arsenic in dairy matrices and infant formula, but it does not speciate inorganic arsenic separately from total arsenic.

Key numbers

The study reports a detection limit of 10 ng/g for arsenic. For raw milk, 9.52% of bovine milk, 8% of goat milk, and 7.55% of sheep milk samples exceeded the Mercosur 20 ng/g maximum tolerance limit cited by the authors.

Table 1 reports total arsenic concentrations:

Table 2 reports total arsenic in powdered dairy and infant formula:

Table 3 reports arsenic daily intake rates through commercial milk and cheese, with infants having the highest median intake. For commercial milk, infant median intake was 0.30 with range 0-2.29; children were 0.08 with range 0-0.59; pregnant consumers were 0.03 with range 0-0.27; adults were 0.02 with range 0-0.14. For cheese, infant median intake was 0.14 with range 0-1.95; children were 0.04 with range 0-0.50; pregnant consumers were 0.02 with range 0-0.23; adults were 0.01 with range 0-0.12.

The target-risk figure states that no estimated target risk exceeded 1, but values for whole powdered milk (TR = 0.95), skimmed powdered milk (TR = 0.92), and commercial fluid milk (TR = 0.97) were close to the threshold.

Methods (brief)

Raw bovine, caprine, and ovine milk samples came from 37 dairy farms in southeastern Cordoba province and northern Buenos Aires province. The authors also sampled commercial milk (n = 36) and cheeses (n = 14) from markets in the study areas. Samples were lyophilized and digested in triplicate with 5 mL nitric acid in a microwave-heated digestor, then diluted to 10% v/v acidity. Arsenic was measured by ICP-MS on mass m/z 75 without collision or reaction gas. Statistical analyses used Infostat and risk assessment used @Risk.

Related evidence

• Infant Formula
• Infant Formula Powder Dairy
• Liquid milk — cow
• Liquid milk — goat / sheep / other ruminant
• Milk powders (whole, skim, specialty)
• Cheese
• Cow Milk Infant Formula
• Milk Based Infant Formula
• Arsenic, Total
• Arsenic

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