Overview
Babeker and colleagues collected raw sugar from all six Sudanese sugar factories in the 2017 season and reported mercury, cadmium, lead and arsenic alongside microbial counts and dextran. Metal values appear in the results text and as a bar chart; the paper labels itself a case study. The authors judged all factories within limits they attribute to EU guidance.
Key numbers
- Means across factories: mercury 0.02, cadmium 0.62, lead 6.74 and arsenic 2.73 mg/kg sugar (Results text, p. 205-206).
- Lead ranged from 5.4 to 9.1 mg/kg and arsenic from 0.36 to 4.0 mg/kg between factories (Results text, p. 206).
Methods (brief)
About 0.25 g of dried, ground sugar was microwave-digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide following ICUMSA methods. The detection instrument, detection limits, replicates and quality control are not reported.
Evidence Fitness
Weak analytical reporting: no instrument, detection limits or reference material, and the abstract contains an unrelated sentence about maize. Lead and arsenic values are far above typical sugar levels. Raw cane sugar is an ingredient, so for the baked-goods and sauce pages that requested it this is a proxy for sugar-cookies, white-cake, blueberry-muffin, doughnut and barbecue-sauce; those pages are not linked. Raw sugar is not refined white sugar, so the white-sugar page is not linked either.