Overview
Pillay and colleagues digested eight brands of breakfast cereal bought in the United Arab Emirates and measured arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead by ICP-MS. The per-sample results are shown only as bar charts. The authors report lead well above the limit they cite in two samples.
Key numbers
- No concentration table is printed; results are in Figures 2 to 5 (pp. 479-480).
- The text describes arsenic of about 100 to 180 ppb with one sample above 800 ppb, cadmium of about 10 to 60 ppb and mercury of about 250 to 400 ppb; the abstract states these as µg/L of digest. These approximate figures are not recorded as findings.
Methods (brief)
Nitric acid digestion, dilution in 1% nitric acid, ICP-MS (PerkinElmer DRC-e) with internal standards and triplicate aliquots. Performance was checked with aqueous multi-element standards only (Table 1); no food reference material, sample mass or basis is given.
Evidence Fitness
Direct breakfast-cereal matrix, but no usable numbers: values are figure-only and the unit (ppb in the text versus µg/L in the abstract) is unresolved. Mercury at hundreds of ppb is implausible for cereal and lacks food-matrix QA. Extraction disposition is no_numeric_results.
Related evidence
Update history
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