Galhoum 2020 - cadmium, lead, and mercury in canned tuna

Galhoum produced canned tuna from local Egyptian albacore and mackerel tuna and compared the products with imported canned albacore and skipjack tuna. The study measured cadmium, lead, and total mercury on a wet-weight canned-tuna basis after acid digestion and ICP/AAS analysis. Cadmium and total mercury were below the cited limits, while lead exceeded the Egyptian 0.1 mg/kg fish limit in every tested canned-tuna treatment and comparator.

Key numbers

Table 5 reports heavy metals in mg/kg wet weight. Treatment A is canned albacore; M1-M4 are mackerel-tuna treatments; C1 is imported albacore tuna; C2 is imported skipjack tuna.

The paper states that total lead ranged from 0.19 to 0.72 mg/kg and exceeded the Egyptian 0.1 mg/kg fish limit in all samples. Total mercury ranged from 0.0008 to 0.011 mg/kg and was well below the FDA 1 mg/kg wet-weight fish level cited by the author. The source reports total mercury only; it does not measure methylmercury.

Methods (brief)

Albacore tuna was purchased from a fisherman in Alexandria and mackerel tuna from Al-Obour market in Cairo in July 2017. The fish were frozen, filleted, canned in glass jars with sunflower oil and salt, precooked at 100 degrees C for 90 minutes, sterilized at 121 degrees C for 15 minutes, aged for 10 days at 4 degrees C, and drained before analysis. Heavy-metal analysis digested 2-3 g of muscle tissue in nitric/perchloric acid and measured Cd, Pb, and Hg using an atomic absorption/ICP method described by the paper as Optima 2000 DV, Perkin Elmer.

Implications

Certification: This source contributes canned-tuna occurrence evidence for Pb, Cd, and total Hg in Egypt-market/local-production context. Total Hg must not be substituted for MeHg in HMTc analyte rows.

Courses: Useful for distinguishing processing-quality studies that still contain routeable finished-product metal data from purely process-engineering papers.

App: Adds canned tuna context for Egypt and imported comparators, with species and processing treatment preserved.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• canned-fish
• canned-tuna
• tinned-fish
• lead
• cadmium
• mercury

Verification notes

• The fetched filename classified the PDF as a vinegar cadmium gap, but the actual source matrix is canned tuna; vinegar appears only as one mackerel-tuna processing treatment.
• The PDF title page gives DOI 10.23880/fsnt-16000213, volume 5 issue 2, received February 09, 2020 and published March 09, 2020.
• The paper reports total mercury as Hg and does not provide methylmercury speciation.

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.