Lorenzana 2009 - Seafood arsenic speciation

Lorenzana, Yeow, Colman, Chappell, and Choudhury reviewed arsenic speciation evidence for seafood risk assessment, focusing on the fraction of total arsenic present as inorganic arsenic. The paper is a literature survey and does not contribute a single new sampling campaign. Its main contribution is context for keeping measured total arsenic separate from inorganic arsenic in seafood, shellfish, freshwater fish, and seaweed.

Key numbers

The abstract reports that, in worldwide literature, percent inorganic arsenic in marine/estuarine finfish did not exceed 7.3% and in shellfish reached 25% in organisms from presumably uncontaminated areas. It also states that percentages can be much higher in organisms from contaminated areas and in seaweed, and that U.S. freshwater finfish site-assessment data generally averaged below 10% but ranged up to nearly 30%.

Table 2 summarizes worldwide seafood literature outside the United States:

Table 3 summarizes U.S. site-assessment data from presumed or known contaminated areas:

The conclusion states that nationwide default values or generalizable values for percent inorganic arsenic in finfish, shellfish, or seaweed/algae potentially contaminated by arsenic at U.S. hazardous waste sites are not supported by the available published data.

Methods (brief)

The authors surveyed journal articles and USEPA documents that reported arsenic speciation in seafood. The review focused on studies reporting detectable concentrations of both total arsenic and inorganic arsenic in tissues of marine and freshwater finfish, shellfish, and seaweed consumed by humans. The authors did not convert dry-weight and wet-weight results to a common basis because tissue water content was often unavailable and variable; they also excluded non-detect inorganic arsenic results from the main summary tables.

Implications

This review supports seafood evidence routing as speciation context rather than as a primary occurrence dataset. It is useful for documenting why total arsenic cannot be silently treated as inorganic arsenic in fish, shellfish, or seaweed, and why literature-default iAs fractions are weak for contaminated-site assessments. Downstream occurrence pooling should use primary studies from the review when available, not this review table as a substitute for sample-level data.

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout; abstract, Approach, Table 2, Table 3, Results, and Discussion/Conclusions were checked in /tmp/f3_texts/lorenzana2009.txt.
• DOI 10.1080/10807030802615949, raw handle MFK_lorenzana2009, and cite-key checks found no existing source page before creation.
• Values are preserved as the review reports them, including separate dry-weight and wet-weight basis labels. No unit conversion or cross-basis pooling was performed.
• Speciation: all key values distinguish total arsenic from inorganic arsenic. The page does not treat total arsenic as inorganic arsenic.
• Brand firewall: not applicable; the review discusses literature and site-assessment datasets, not branded products.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; broad seafood, shellfish, fish, and seaweed routing is used because the review spans multiple species and markets.

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.