Overview
Asare surveyed 300 consumers to find the two most consumed locally produced alcoholic herbal bitters, bought 130 bottles in three Ashanti Region towns, and measured lead, chromium and copper by Zeeman atomic absorption spectrometry after aqua regia digestion. Tables 2 and 3 give town means for each drink. All results are printed in mg/mL, which gives implausibly high values.
Key numbers
- Product A: lead 0.28 (Mampong), 0.45 (Nsuta) and 0.31 (Agona) mg/mL as printed (Table 2).
- Product B: lead 5.83, 5.6 and 6.5 mg/mL as printed; chromium 74.6 to 80.6 mg/mL (Table 3).
- Reference-standard recoveries: lead 98.20%, chromium 97.67%, copper 99.80% (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
One milliliter of drink was digested to dryness in aqua regia at 180 °C, taken up to 50 mL and read by Zeeman AAS in triplicate. A mixed standard solution carried through the digestion checked recovery, and blanks were run. No detection limit is given.
Evidence Fitness
The unit problem is serious: lead of 0.28 to 6.5 mg/mL would mean hundreds to thousands of milligrams per liter, which is not credible for a drink, and the intended unit cannot be worked out from the paper. All values carry an integrity flag and must not be compared with limits as printed. Single author, no detection limit, and the number of samples per town is not stated. Herbal bitters are a proxy for whiskey only, so the whiskey page is not linked.
Related evidence
Update history
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