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Monitoring of metal content in the tissues of wild boar (Sus scrofa) and its food safety aspect

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Overview

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.

Update history

No substantive edit history is available in this build. The full commit record is available in git.

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