Overview
Du and colleagues, at the Shanxi Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, sampled 180 red jujubes from three Shanxi production regions in the 2022 ripening season and measured chromium, nickel, lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury by ICP-MS. Mercury was not detected in any sample. Lead was detected in every Xiangfen sample but in about half of those from the other two regions.
Key numbers
- Lead, Xiangfen (n = 60): median 0.029 mg/kg (P25 0.026, P75 0.038), maximum 0.0496 mg/kg, detected in 100% (Table 2).
- Lead, Taigu: median 0.00416 mg/kg, maximum 0.0479 mg/kg, detected in 51.7% (Table 2).
- Cadmium maximum 0.0261 mg/kg (Taigu); not detected in Xiangfen (Table 2).
- Arsenic maximum 0.0247 mg/kg (Taigu), detected in 8.3 to 38.3% of samples (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Pitted flesh was dried to constant weight and milled (dry basis), microwave-digested in nitric acid and analysed by ICP-MS following GB 5009.268-2016. LODs were 0.004 mg/kg for lead and arsenic and 0.003 mg/kg for cadmium and mercury. Jujube powder reference material GBW10204 gave recoveries of 92 to 108%.
Evidence Fitness
Direct evidence for jujube fruit, with 60 samples per region and good QA. The journal has no Crossref-registered DOI (the printed DOI does not resolve), so the record is identified by URL and peer review is unverified. Only medians and quartiles are printed, with non-detects apparently set to half the LOD; those values are stored as censored. One cell (Jiaocheng lead median below its own 25th percentile) is internally inconsistent. Results are on a dry basis.