Overview
Nguyen and colleagues measured lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury by AAS, and pesticide residues by LC/MS/MS, in 60 commercial cheese products sold in Ho Chi Minh City between November 2019 and September 2020. Table 1 gives mean ± SD, median and maximum for 30 domestic and 30 imported products. The article is in Vietnamese with an English summary.
Key numbers
- Domestic cheese: lead 0.011 ± 0.007, arsenic 0.237 ± 0.181, cadmium 0.481 ± 0.371, mercury 0.024 ± 0.017 mg/kg (Table 1, p. 90).
- Imported cheese: lead 0.005 ± 0.007, arsenic 0.099 ± 0.141, cadmium 0.380 ± 0.358, mercury 0.01 ± 0.014 mg/kg (Table 1).
- Maximum cadmium 1.330 mg/kg (domestic); exceedances of the national limit: lead 2/30 domestic and 1/30 imported, cadmium 2/30 domestic (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
Sampling per TCVN 6400:2010 (ISO 707:2008); heavy metals by AAS (ZA-3000) at the Military Medical Academy; results compared with QCVN 05-3:2010/BYT. No LOD, reference material or recovery is reported.
Evidence Fitness
Moderate sample size with full summary statistics, but no quality-control data. The English summary prints different mercury means (0.017 and 0.019 mg/kg) from Table 1, and imported medians of 0.000 are read as non-detects. The printed issue is volume 62, number 1, 2021, so the publication year is 2021, not the 2020 in the manifest; the DOI is not printed in the PDF. Cheese is a proxy for the cheese-pizza page, which is not linked. Two authors (Nguyen VC, Dinh TDH) and the same laboratory also produced the 2024 Vietnam dairy survey; the two data sets differ in samples and values.