Overview
Lawan and colleagues collected sorghum and maize grain at farm locations in two Borno State local government areas, before planting and after harvest, and measured nine metals by AAS. Location means appear only in bar charts; the text prints the range of those means for each crop and area. Most of the paper is a health risk assessment.
Key numbers
- Sorghum, Hawul: lead 0.02 to 0.48, cadmium 0.09 to 1.03, arsenic 0.01 to 0.80 mg/kg (Results, p. 178).
- Sorghum, Bayo: lead 0.01 to 0.65, cadmium 0.04 to 0.43, arsenic 0.10 to 0.70 mg/kg (pp. 178-179).
- Maize, Bayo: lead 0.02 to 0.08, cadmium 0.09 to 0.16, arsenic 0.01 to 0.12 mg/kg (p. 180).
Methods (brief)
Samples were digested as in the authors’ earlier paper and read by AAS (Shimadzu AA-6800). No detection limits, reference materials, recoveries, sample counts or sampling years are given.
Evidence Fitness
Weak. Only ranges are printed; per-location values are figure-only. Cadmium near 1 mg/kg in sorghum is high and unvalidated. The intake and hazard tables are impossible (maize arsenic doses up to 284,000 mg/kg per day from grain under 0.2 mg/kg), which casts doubt on the whole analysis. The manifest lists the first author as “IB”, which is the author’s initials; the record uses the printed surname. Raw maize grain is an ingredient proxy for corn-grits, corn-tortilla, cornbread and tortilla-chips; those pages are not linked.