Overview
Harmanescu and colleagues measured iron, manganese, zinc, copper, nickel, cadmium and lead by flame AAS in garden vegetables from two old mining areas and a reference village in Banat County, Romania, and calculated daily intakes and target hazard quotients. Concentrations are on a fresh-matter basis. Lead in parsley root from the Ruschita mining area was about 200 times the reference level. The published fruit-vegetable table repeats the leafy-vegetable table, so no green bean or cucumber concentrations are printed.
Key numbers
- Parsley root, Ruschita: lead “15.78* ± 7.81” mg/kg fresh matter vs “0.08 ± 0.01” at the reference site (Table 2, p. 3).
- Cabbage, Ruschita: lead “0.90* ± 0.30”, cadmium “0.12 ± 0.02” mg/kg fresh matter (Table 3, p. 4).
- Table 4 (cucumber and green beans) as printed duplicates Table 3 row for row (page 4).
Methods (brief)
Washed samples were oven dried at 80 °C, ashed, taken up in nitric acid and read by high-resolution continuum-source flame AAS. Results were expressed per fresh matter. Certified reference materials gave recoveries of 92 to 105 percent; detection limits were 0.01 µg/g (cadmium) and 0.05 µg/g (lead).
Evidence Fitness
Eight samples per vegetable per site with mean and SD, with CRM recoveries reported. Sites are contaminated mining areas, so values are not representative of ordinary produce; the reference area gives a background comparison. Garden-grown fresh green beans were sampled, but their concentrations were not printed because of the Table 4 duplication, so the study gives no usable evidence for green-beans or canned-green-beans and neither page is linked.