This study applied neutrosophic statistics to analyze Pb and tHg concentrations in 70 breast milk samples from lactating mothers living near industrial zones in Lahore, Pakistan. The authors collected interval-form data (minimum–maximum pairs per age group) and used neutrosophic methods to represent indeterminacy that classical mean-±-SD statistics cannot capture. The headline finding is elevated Pb and Hg in women from industrial areas, with Pb ranging approximately 0.85–2.89 ppb and tHg ranging approximately 2.87–16.85 ppb across age groups, with both metrics showing wider uncertainty ranges than classical statistics would express.
Key numbers
Concentrations are reported as intervals [minimum, maximum] across age groups 25–40 years (n = 70 total). The paper reports values in ppb without specifying mass-volume basis; breast milk is a biological fluid, so ppb is conventionally µg/L rather than µg/kg. Values below are reproduced in the paper’s native units.
- Pb: range across all age-group intervals = [0.845, 2.890] ppb; classical means by age group = 1.583–2.620 ppb (±0.08–0.94 SD)
- tHg: range across all age-group intervals = [2.873, 16.853] ppb; classical means by age group = 9.0975–13.2495 ppb (±1.11–6.50 SD)
The paper describes raised Pb and Hg in lactating women from industrial-zone localities in Lahore. The small per-age-group intervals, absence of mercury speciation, and lack of LOD/LOQ reporting limit comparison to other breast-milk datasets.
The article says the data analyzed are available in the published Ahmad et al. 2023 companion paper, so this page treats Fatima et al. 2024 as a methodological reanalysis of Pb/Hg breast-milk interval data rather than as an independent exposure survey.
Methods (brief)
Analytical method: flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS). Sample prep: 2 mL breast milk per sample dried at 50°C, diluted with 5 mL distilled water, organic matter removed, and precipitates filtered. Metals measured: Pb and Hg only. No mercury speciation and no LOD/LOQ values are reported in this paper. The neutrosophic contribution is statistical: age-specific minimum/maximum intervals are converted into neutrosophic expressions and compared with classical mean ± SD summaries.
Implications
Standards work: Breast milk is a biomonitoring matrix for maternal exposure, not a certified food product. The source can support human-exposure context for Lahore industrial-zone settings, but it should not be used as product-occurrence evidence or standards math for dairy, infant formula, or food ingredients.
Courses: Useful as an illustrative case study for how industrial pollution in Pakistan drives heavy metal accumulation in breast milk. The neutrosophic framing is a methodological curiosity; the substantive lesson is that lactating women in industrial zones show elevated Pb and tHg.
App: Breast milk is not a consumer product in the wiki’s app model; this source supports the biomonitoring and health sections but does not contribute to ingredient-level contamination profiles.
Microbiome: Not addressed in this study.
Wiki pages updated on ingest
Verification notes
- Merge-enhanced 2026-05-18 from the full manual-fetch PDF path and SHA-256 recorded in frontmatter.
- DOI identity check matched the existing source page; no duplicate source page was found.
- Replaced the older
manual-fetch-kimihandle, truncated raw path, and generic mercury wikilink with current provenance and total-mercury routing. - Removed unsupported microbiome language and kept implications source-only.
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.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| b0f3d38 | 2026-06-12 | batch | corpus rescreen b04 old terminal skips |