Overview
Maryati and colleagues bought 30 open-displayed snack foods from vendors inside and outside Joyoboyo bus terminal in Surabaya and measured lead by AAS. Every sample had detectable lead. Snacks sold outside, next to traffic, had higher lead than those sold inside.
Key numbers
- Outside the terminal (n = 15): lead mean 0.28 mg/kg, range 0.16 to 0.36 (Table 4, p. 135).
- Inside the terminal (n = 15): lead mean 0.19 mg/kg, range 0.11 to 0.26 (Table 4).
- 40.0% of outside samples and 13.3% of inside samples were above 0.25 mg/kg (Table 5).
Methods (brief)
Purposive sampling of fried foods, traditional cakes, skewered foods and light snacks; lead by AAS at an accredited laboratory. The digestion method, detection limit and reference-material results are not reported. Results are not broken down by food type.
Evidence Fitness
A small, single-site study. Its Methods and Results sections print two different sets of summary statistics for the same samples, and the inclusion criteria conflict with the food list. The snacks are mixed street foods, not baby snacks, pretzels, saltine crackers or tortilla chips: the paper is a proxy for teething-and-snacks, pretzels, saltine-crackers and tortilla-chips, none of which are linked.