Levels and potential health risk of heavy metals in marketed vegetables in Zhejiang, China

Overview

Pan and colleagues measured arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), mercury (Hg), nickel (Ni), and lead (Pb) in 5,785 marketed vegetable samples representing 28 species from Zhejiang province, China. The paper reports overall mean, P97.5, range, and exceedance counts in mg/kg, fresh weight, plus selected species-level highlights from the supplementary table. Arsenic and mercury are reported as total As and total Hg only; no inorganic arsenic or methylmercury speciation is provided.

Key numbers

Table 1 reports concentrations of heavy metals in vegetables from Zhejiang province in mg/kg, fresh weight:

The paper reports that Cd exceeded the Chinese maximum allowable concentration in 0.25% of samples and Pb exceeded it in 1.56% of samples. Target analytes below LOD were treated as one-half of LOD for mean calculations.

Selected species-level highlights reported in the Results text:

Table 2 exposure estimates for vegetable intake:

Methods (brief)

Vegetable samples were collected from 11 cities in Zhejiang from March to October 2014 and analyzed within 24 h of storage at 4 C. A 5-10 g sample was digested with 10 mL concentrated nitric acid at 220 C with periodic hydrogen peroxide additions, then diluted to 50 mL. Cd, Cr, Pb, and Ni were measured by Thermo SOLAAR iCE3000 graphite-furnace AAS, while As and Hg were measured by hydride generation-atomic fluorescence (HG-AFS 9230). LODs for As, Cd, Cr, Ni, Hg, and Pb were 0.005, 0.001, 0.005, 0.004, 0.005, and 0.005 mg/kg, respectively.

Implications

This source contributes a large Zhejiang-market vegetable occurrence dataset for total As, Cd, total Cr, total Hg, Ni, and Pb. The overall Table 1 statistics are directly usable for broad vegetable routing, while species-specific values are limited in the extracted PDF to narrative highlights because Table S1 is referenced as supplementary information rather than embedded in the extracted text. The source is not suitable for inorganic arsenic (iAs), methylmercury (MeHg), or hexavalent chromium (Cr-VI) pooling because it does not report those species.

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.