Overview
Ericson and colleagues investigated potential sources of elevated blood lead levels in Georgian children and found exceptionally high Pb concentrations in multiple spices. Although the auto-fetch row was labelled as cookware, the routeable consumer-product evidence is for spices; cookware, paint, soil, dust, toys, and water were comparison media and were generally within applied guidance values. The paper is strong direct evidence that adulterated or contaminated spices can be a high-lead exposure source in a specific market.
Key numbers
- The investigation used 682 portable XRF measurements across cookware (n=53), paint (n=207), soil (n=91), spices (n=128), toys (n=78), and other media (n=125), plus 61 dust wipes and 15 water samples.
- Six commonly used spices had elevated Pb medians: coriander 8.43 mg/kg, khmeli suneli kharcho 741.98 mg/kg, kviteli kvavili 4837.22 mg/kg, svanuri marili 1345.53 mg/kg, turmeric 1897.06 mg/kg, and utsko suneli 13.12 mg/kg.
- The highest spice Pb value was 20,058.61 mg/kg in kviteli kvavili from a home sample.
- Of 98 home spice samples, 42 (43%) had detectable Pb. Among those detected samples, the median Pb concentration was 88 mg/kg with IQR 14-1645 mg/kg.
- Bazaar samples from Adjara showed frequent detection: 14 of 17 samples (82%) had detectable Pb, with median 233 mg/kg and IQR 22-4465 mg/kg. No spices from Tbilisi or Imereti bazaars had detectable Pb in this convenience sample.
- Regional summary values for spice Pb included Adjara median 11.44 mg/kg and high 20,058.61 mg/kg; Guria median 7.56 mg/kg and high 3461.71 mg/kg; Imereti median below LOD but high 3327.72 mg/kg.
- Comparison media were much lower overall: the spice range was below LOD to 20,058.61 mg/kg, while cookware pXRF lead ranged from 0.00056% to 3.395%, toys ranged below LOD to 1098.37 ppm, soil ranged 5.65-842.7 ppm, and drinking water ranged 0.067-7.56 ppb.
Methods (brief)
The team selected 25 homes from a prior nationally representative child blood-lead survey, including homes of children with blood lead above 30 micrograms/dL and below 5 micrograms/dL. Spices were measured by portable XRF and a subset of 15 spice samples was checked by ICP-MS using AOAC 2013.06; pXRF spice Pb measurements were adjusted because ICP-MS values were approximately 73% of pXRF measurements. LOD substitution used LOD divided by the square root of two. The measured analyte was lead; no arsenic, cadmium, or mercury values are routed from this source.
Implications
Certification: The values are product-occurrence evidence for spices in the Georgian market and should be kept jurisdiction-aware. They should not be silently pooled into US-market spice benchmarks without a documented cross-market rationale.
Courses: Useful for teaching source investigations, field XRF screening with confirmatory ICP-MS, and the difference between a suspected household medium and the actual dominant exposure source.
App: Supports a market-context warning that some spices can be extreme Pb outliers, especially where adulteration or color enhancement is suspected.
Wiki pages this source may touch
- Spices
- Spices
- Turmeric
- Black Pepper
- Salt
- Lead
- x-ray-fluorescence
- ICP-MS — Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
Verification notes
- DOI, title, authors, and publication were read from the Annals of Global Health PDF citation block and title page.
- The PDF filename and auto-fetch row point to cookware, but the source’s own conclusion identifies spices as the elevated Pb matrix. Cookware is retained only as a comparison matrix.
- The paper reports total lead in spices by pXRF with ICP-MS subset adjustment. No brand-level values are reproduced.
- Market scope is Georgia; benchmark pooling for another jurisdiction needs explicit stratification.
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and 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.