Arsenic in Chicken Meat

Overview

This Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future brief summarizes the Nachman et al. Environmental Health Perspectives study of arsenic species in US chicken meat. It reports a compact occurrence signal for inorganic arsenic in chicken likely raised with roxarsone and describes the underlying market-basket sampling frame. Because the local PDF is a two-page research brief rather than the full peer-reviewed article, this page treats the source as B-tier secondary evidence and flags the full article DOI as a near-duplicate to avoid double counting if the primary paper is later fetched.

Key numbers

• Sample frame: the brief reports 142 chicken breast samples from 82 stores in 10 US cities, representing 60 unique chicken brands. It groups the samples as 69 conventional, 36 conventional but antibiotic-free, and 37 USDA Organic.
• Inorganic arsenic: the brief reports that chicken likely raised with roxarsone had inorganic arsenic 2.3 micrograms per kilogram of meat, described as elevated compared with USDA Organic chicken samples. The brief does not print a USDA Organic comparator value.
• Roxarsone detection: the brief reports roxarsone in 45 percent of tested conventionally grown chicken samples and reports that roxarsone was not detected in the 37 USDA Organic chickens.
• Raw/cooked split: the brief states that half of each chicken breast was tested after cooking and the other half was left raw. It reports that cooking chicken that tested positive for roxarsone decreased roxarsone levels but increased inorganic arsenic in the meat; it does not print the cooked/raw numerical concentrations in the extracted text.
• Analytical scope: the brief states that the University of Graz analyzed each sample for total arsenic, roxarsone, inorganic arsenic, and methylated arsenic species.

Methods (brief)

The brief describes a US market-basket study of chicken breasts purchased in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Flagstaff, Denver, Fayetteville, Austin, Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, and nearby stores in those markets as shown on the brief’s map. Each breast was split into raw and cooked portions before arsenic speciation analysis. The local brief does not provide the complete analytical method, LOD/LOQ, or full distribution tables; those details belong to the primary EHP article linked by the source as abstract 1206245.

Related evidence

• Arsenic, Inorganic
• Arsenic, Total
• Chicken
• Poultry
• Meat and Poultry
• Poultry (chicken, turkey, duck)

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git.