Baptista et al. 2024 - wild-boar liver and kidney metals in Spain

Baptista et al. (2024) measured metal and metalloid concentrations in liver and kidney tissues from 28 hunted wild boars in Castile and Leon, Spain. The study is routeable for game-meat and organ-meat occurrence because liver and kidney tissues are edible offal and the paper frames wild boars as part of the hunting economy and human diet in the Iberian Peninsula. Concentrations are reported in mg/kg dry weight; arsenic and chromium are total-element ICP-MS measurements without inorganic-arsenic or Cr-VI speciation.

Key numbers

Table 1 reports mean +/- SD concentrations in mg/kg dry weight for liver and kidney tissues. The table also gives source-calculated maximum levels (ML) for Cd and Pb after converting EU food-contaminant wet-weight values to the study’s dry-weight basis; those ML values are the paper’s regulatory comparator, not HMTc thresholds.

The abstract highlights kidney Cd as the most concerning value, reporting 7.063 +/- 7.271 mg/kg dw compared with the paper’s calculated Cd maximum level of 2.491 mg/kg dw for kidney. The Results text reports no statistically significant differences between metal(loid) values and geographic locations. Histopathology context in Table 2 records hydropic changes in liver in 8/28 (28.57%) animals, liver congestion in 6/28 (21.43%), kidney non-purulent nephritis in 7/28 (25.00%), and kidney congestion in 4/28 (14.29%).

The paper reports several tissue-specific correlations: liver Zn-Cu r = 0.567; p = 0.003, liver Zn-Co r = 0.460; p = 0.018, kidney Ni-Cr r = 0.486; p = 0.010, kidney Ni-Co r = 0.638; p < 0.001, kidney Co-tAs r = 0.586; p = 0.001, kidney Zn-Cu r = 0.761; p < 0.001, kidney Zn-Cd r = 0.593; p = 0.001, and kidney Cu-Cd r = 0.383; p = 0.049. Wild boars with liver hydropic changes had higher hepatic Ni (p = 0.013) and lower Cu (p = 0.030) and Zn (p = 0.008) than the total group.

Methods (brief)

Twenty-eight wild boars killed during the February 2021 hunting season in Castile and Leon were sampled from eleven named localities. Liver and kidney samples were collected from fresh carcasses immediately after death; tissue for element quantification was stored below -10 degrees C, freeze-dried for 48 h at -56 degrees C, and digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Concentrations of As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn were measured by ICP-MS. The average quantification limits in mg/kg were below 0.025 for As, 0.01 for Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, and Pb, and 0.1 for Zn. The quality-control procedure used ERM BB185 bovine liver certified reference material, blanks, and duplicates; duplicate CRM recoveries were As 99%, Cd 71%, Cu 70%, Pb 95%, and Zn 87%.

Implications

This source adds a Castile and Leon, Spain wild-boar offal dataset to the game-meats evidence pool. Kidney Cd is the clear high-signal tissue-metal pair in this study, while liver and kidney Pb means sit below the paper’s converted dry-weight Pb comparator. Because no skeletal muscle samples were measured, this paper should not be used as direct wild-boar muscle occurrence evidence; it is liver/kidney organ-meat context.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• game-meats
• meat
• organ-meats
• arsenic-total
• cadmium
• cobalt
• chromium
• copper
• nickel
• lead
• zinc

Verification notes

• Identity checks before writing found no existing DOI, raw-handle, or cite-key page for 10.1007/s11259-023-10272-1, MFK_heavy-metals-and-metalloids-in-wild-boars-sus, or baptista2024-wild-boar-metals-spain.
• Table 1 was re-opened from /tmp/hmi-june9-034.txt before drafting. Liver and kidney means, SDs, and source-calculated Cd/Pb ML values are transcribed from the table without unit conversion.
• Units preserved: occurrence values remain in mg/kg dry weight; the paper separately states the wet-weight regulatory values it converted from, but this page does not convert the source’s analytical values to wet weight.
• Speciation: As is recorded as tAs because the ICP-MS method does not speciate inorganic arsenic; Cr is total Cr, not Cr-VI. The paper does not report Hg or MeHg.
• Matrix boundary: only liver and kidney tissues were measured. Frontmatter includes [[products/game-meats]] for the hunted wild-boar product family and [[ingredients/organ-meats]] for the measured edible-offal matrices, but the body states that no muscle occurrence values are available.
• Jurisdictions: ES records the sampling country; EU records the paper’s explicit Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915 comparator for Cd and Pb.
• Brand firewall: the study uses hunted animals and names no commercial meat brand. Instrument and certified-reference-material names are scientific method details.

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.