Nachman et al. 2013 - Chicken arsenic research brief

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.

Implications

Certification (HMTc): This source contributes B-tier secondary occurrence context for inorganic arsenic in US chicken meat, with the sample frame and the single reported 2.3 micrograms per kilogram of meat iAs value preserved exactly. The full Nachman et al. 2013 article should be preferred for any future pooled occurrence extraction.

Courses: The brief is useful for teaching the difference between total arsenic, inorganic arsenic, methylated arsenic species, and an arsenical feed drug residue in the same poultry matrix.

App: The source can support chicken/poultry arsenic-speciation context, especially as a pointer to the full EHP market-basket paper.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• arsenic-inorganic
• arsenic-total
• chicken
• poultry
• meat-and-poultry
• poultry-product

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout to /tmp/mfk_june8_570.txt; the title block, Key Findings, Research Summary, map labels, and full-title/abstract-link footer were checked against this page.
• The extracted brief does not print a DOI. DOI 10.1289/ehp.1206245 was checked because it is the primary EHP article linked by abstract identifier 1206245; no source page for that primary article was found. Existing wiki/sources/lasky2013-arsenic-chicken-correspondence.md is a separate correspondence page and was recorded as a near-duplicate context page, not a duplicate of this brief.
• Units are copied exactly as printed: 2.3 micrograms per kilogram of meat. The brief does not state wet/dry basis beyond “meat,” so no basis was inferred or converted.
• Speciation: the reported numeric occurrence value is inorganic arsenic. The brief also says total arsenic and methylated arsenic species were analyzed, but it does not print total arsenic concentration values in the extracted text.
• Brand firewall: the brief states that the sample represented 60 unique chicken brands. This source page omits brand names and reports only category/production-group data.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; chicken-meat and chicken-breast are matrix descriptors rather than product or ingredient slugs.

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.