Lead in game meat: a study of bioaccessibility of lead metal fragments

Overview

Qvarfort and Holmgren measured total lead and simulated gastrointestinal release of lead from metallic fragments in wild-boar tissues collected around bullet wound channels. The study is not a representative market-occurrence survey; it deliberately sampled the most contaminated wound-channel tissues so that metallic-lead dissolution could be tested. It is useful as game-meat lead-fragment bioaccessibility context, with its measured tissue lead values kept on the source’s mg/kg ww basis.

Key numbers

• Article identity: Journal of Analytical Techniques and Research 7, pages 09-22, DOI 10.26502/jatr.47; the PDF prints received December 18, 2024, accepted December 26, 2025, and published February 11, 2025.
• Object 1: male wild boar (Sus scrofa), live weight 45.5 kg, shooting distance 75 metres, calibre 6.5 -284, muzzle velocity 890 m/sec, calculated impact velocity 840 m/sec, bullet weight 9.1 grams (140grs).
• Object 2: female wild boar (Sus scrofa), live weight 72 kg, shooting distance 25 metres, calibre 6,5x55, muzzle velocity 870 m/sec, calculated impact velocity 845 m/sec, bullet weight 10.1 grams (156 grs), bullet entrance Left side, 3th rib, bullet exit Right side, 4th rib.
• Study design: samples were taken from a 9 centimeters wound-channel diameter and from a 6.5 centimeters radius around the wound-channel center, plus chest-wall, lung, and heart tissues; sample weights were 20 to 120 gram.
• CT/radiography context: the authors state that lead fragments smaller than 1/10 millimeter were observable in high magnification images and that Figure 3 showed maximum lead-fragment distance through bloodstreams in the chest cavity of 134 mm for Object 1.
• Overall source summary: total mean lead content for all samples was 273.6 mg/kg ww for n=17; the source states this high mean reflects deliberate wound-channel sampling rather than normal edible-meat sampling.
• Source-side bioaccessibility summary: the Results section states that bioaccessible lead varied between 0.13 to 2% with mean 0.98 %, but Table 4 includes one 2.38 percent value; the abstract and Summary also describe the bioaccessible part as less than 2% in most samples and report mean 0.5%.

Table 3, Object 1 wound-channel and nearby tissue samples:

Table 4, Object 2 wound-channel and nearby tissue samples:

Table 2, Object 1 gastric-versus-intestinal dissolution check:

Table 5, lead-shot-only gastrointestinal simulation:

Methods (brief)

The authors CT-scanned deep-frozen, uneviscerated wild boars in natural posture, then used CT and high-resolution radiography to locate lead fragments around the wound channel and in chest-cavity tissues. Semi-thawed samples were homogenized into a meat paste, flattened into paper molds, frozen, X-rayed, and divided so one portion could be analyzed for total lead and the second could undergo in vitro gastrointestinal simulation. Total lead was measured after heating samples at 4500 C for 12 hours, leaching ash with 7M HNO3, autoclaving at 200 kPa (120°C) for 30 minutes, and analyzing by SS 028150-2/ ICP-MS and SS 028150-2/ ICP-AES; procedural blanks were < 0.0005 mg/L. The in vitro simulation used gastric juice adjusted to pH 3, 2.5 hours at 37oC, then intestinal juice adjusted to pH 6.3 for an additional 2 hours at 37oC, followed by centrifugation at 14,000 rpm.

Related evidence

• Lead
• Meat and poultry
• Meat and Poultry
• Organ Meats (Kidney and Liver)
• Game meats (venison, bison, rabbit)
• EFSA — Lead in Food (2010), No-Threshold Position

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.