Lénárt et al. 2023 - Metals in wild boar muscle and fat

Lénárt and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, manganese, mercury, and zinc in muscle and fat from 20 Hungarian wild boars. The paper is routeable for game-meat occurrence evidence because it reports tissue concentrations on a wet-weight mg/kg basis and separates muscle from fat. Lead was the main food-safety signal; arsenic, mercury, and cadmium were below the stated detection limits in every tissue sample.

Key numbers

• Sample frame: 20 wild boars, 10 female and 10 male, sampled after shooting during the regular hunting season.
• Analytical basis: wet-weight tissue, reported as mg/kg.
• Detection limits: Pb 0.2 mg/kg, As and Hg 0.5 mg/kg, and Cd 0.05 mg/kg.
• As, Hg, and Cd were below detection in every tested tissue sample.
• Pb in muscle was 0.36 +/- 0.16 mg/kg in females and 0.22 +/- 0.06 mg/kg in males.
• Pb was detected above LOD in 70 percent of female muscle samples and 20 percent of male muscle samples; the individual female muscle range was 0.20 to 0.67 mg/kg, and the female mean and the per-sample values both exceeded the EU 1881/2006 maximum level of 0.1 mg/kg for Pb in meat.
• Pb was below the 0.2 mg/kg LOD in every fat sample of both sexes except one male, so fat-tissue Pb is reported as below LOD with one above-LOD outlier; the paper sets a Pb regulatory ceiling of 0.1 mg/kg for animal fat under 1881/2006/EC.
• Cr in muscle was 0.14 +/- 0.08 mg/kg in females and 0.13 +/- 0.06 mg/kg in males.

Methods (brief)

The authors analyzed wild-boar muscle and fat tissues by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry after tissue preparation. The source reports total element concentrations, not arsenic, mercury, or chromium species.

Implications

Certification: The source supports a game-meat lead occurrence row and a broad hunted-meat context note; it should not be treated as livestock meat.

Courses: It is useful for explaining why hunted game can differ from farmed meat because ammunition and environmental uptake both affect concentrations.

App: Game-meat entries can use this as a European wild-boar signal, with the caveat that values are harvest- and geography-specific.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Game meats (venison, bison, rabbit)
• Meat and poultry
• Lead
• Cadmium
• Arsenic, Total
• Mercury, Total
• Chromium

Verification notes

The DOI appears in multiple auto-fetched files because the wishlist fetched the same paper under Cd, Pb, tAs, and tHg gaps. This page is the canonical page for those duplicate paths. The paper reports total As, total Hg, and total Cr; it does not support iAs, MeHg, or Cr(VI).

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.