Overview
The authors bought eight alcoholic beverages, from local palm wine to an imported whisky, at pubs in Awka and measured eight metals by flame atomic absorption, then combined the results with a drinker survey to estimate hazard indices and cancer risk. Each beverage is one product analyzed in triplicate. The PDF filed is the Research Square preprint; its printed DOI differs from the Chemistry Africa DOI in the manifest.
Key numbers
- Whisky: lead 0.052 mg/l, cadmium 0.011 mg/l, chromium 0.032 mg/l, nickel 0.008 mg/l (Table 3).
- Local dry gin: lead 0.078 mg/l and copper 0.936 mg/l, the highest of both (Table 3).
- Stout: lead 0.022 mg/l, the lowest (Table 3).
- Whisky manganese: “No Data” (Table 3).
Methods (brief)
Two milliliters of each drink were digested with perchloric and nitric acid and analyzed in triplicate by flame atomic absorption. Detection limits were set at three times the blank standard deviation but are not printed. An unnamed reference material gave recoveries of 93.5 to 105.5%.
Evidence Fitness
One sample per beverage, so the whisky values are a single product, not a survey. Flame atomic absorption is not sensitive enough for cadmium near 0.01 mg/l, and detection limits are not given. This is a preprint version, which may differ from the published article. It does measure whisky directly, but only one sample.