Overview
Asomugha and colleagues measured lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury by atomic absorption, plus 16 PAHs, in 16 commercial drinks bought in Awka in August and September 2019, and ran USEPA-style risk calculations. Lead was found in 13 of 16 samples, with values from 0.0147 to 2.9153 mg/L. The sample set mixes soda, malt drinks and yoghurt without saying which sample is which.
Key numbers
- Lead: 0.0147 to 2.9153 mg/l, mean 0.6116 mg/l (Table 1).
- Cadmium: up to 1.8630 mg/l (sample C), not detected in 9 samples (Table 1).
- Arsenic: up to 0.3234 mg/l; mercury up to 0.0060 mg/l (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
Fifty milliliters of each drink was digested with nitric acid on a hotplate and analyzed by AAS against calibration curves. No detection limit, reference material, recovery or blank is reported. Means appear to be calculated over detected samples only.
Evidence Fitness
Very weak analytical support and implausibly high lead and cadmium for commercial drinks; treat as low confidence. These are finished drinks of unstated type, so for soft-drink-bases, sports-drink-bases, lemon-lime-soft-drink, diet-cola and flavored-carbonated-bottled-waters this is at best a generic finished soft drink proxy and none of those pages is linked. The printed issue is 2021, while the manifest gives 2020.