Rabeey et al. 2025 — Heavy metals in imported frozen bovine tissues, Sohag, Egypt

This study analyzed 315 imported frozen bovine samples (105 each of muscle, liver, and kidney) from local markets in Sohag, Egypt, for total mercury (tHg), lead (Pb), and cadmium (Cd) by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The authors report frequent exceedance of their cited maximum permissible limits for Pb and Hg, while calculated dietary risk indices remained below concern thresholds for average adult Egyptian consumption rates. The core tissue pattern was muscle highest for tHg, liver highest for Pb, and kidney highest for Cd.

Key numbers

All concentrations are reported as mg/kg wet weight. The source table labels the same basis as µg/g wet weight; 1 µg/g = 1 mg/kg.

Table 1 concentrations and exceedance rates

Estimated dietary intake and non-cancer risk indices

Cancer risk estimates

Kidney was excluded from the authors’ health-risk calculations because they describe lower exceedance rates and lower per-capita kidney consumption than muscle and liver.

Methods (brief)

Sample collection: 315 imported frozen bovine tissue samples (105 muscle, 105 liver, 105 kidney) collected from local markets in Sohag City, Egypt, and held frozen until analysis.

Preparation: 2 g tissue homogenized in a screw-capped tube with 12 mL concentrated nitric-perchloric acid (2:1), digested overnight in a 55 °C water bath, cooled, diluted with deionized water, filtered through Whatman Grade 42 paper, and made up to 50 mL.

Analysis: Buck Scientific 210 VGP atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Pb and Cd were measured with an oxidizing air-acetylene flame; Hg was measured using a mercury hydride system / cold-vapor technique. Wavelengths were 253.65 nm (Hg), 283.31 nm (Pb), and 228.80 nm (Cd). Calibration curve R² values were 0.999. The authors report spike recoveries of 96.4% (Hg), 98.9% (Pb), and 95.9% (Cd), with dogfish liver DOLT-4 used as certified reference material.

Speciation: The paper reports total mercury. It does not speciate methylmercury from inorganic mercury, so this page uses tHg, not MeHg.

Implications

• Certification: Provides occurrence and exceedance-rate evidence for the beef product row and the beef / organ-meat ingredient nodes. Preserve the market context: imported frozen bovine tissues sampled in Sohag, Egypt, with source countries described as Brazil, India, and the USA.
• Courses: Useful as a teaching example for separating regulatory-limit exceedance from exposure-index calculations. More than half of several tissue-metal combinations exceeded author-cited MPLs, while THQ, TTHQ, and CR values remained below the authors’ concern thresholds under their Egyptian adult consumption assumptions.
• App: Provides market-specific beef and organ-meat occurrence values. Do not generalize these values to all US or EU beef without additional source support.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• beef
• organ-meats
• meat
• meat-and-poultry
• beef-product
• mercury-total
• lead
• cadmium

Verification notes

• 2026-05-18 Codex duplicate cleanup: retained rabeey2025-bovine-hg-pb-cd-egypt as the canonical source page and retired duplicate source page rabeey2025-bovine-meat-organs-hg-pb-cd-egypt.
• The local seafood-folder PDF is the same DOI as the earlier loose manual-fetch copy. This page now points to the seafood-priority PDF path and records its SHA-256.
• Cross-vendor audit (Codex, 2026-05-18) checked slug vocabulary: beef-product is an existing product page, and meat, beef-muscle, bovine-liver, and bovine-kidney are source-specific matrix descriptors used to preserve the tissue split.
• Numerical fidelity follows the article’s Tables 1-4. The abstract reports different SE values for several means (for example tHg muscle 0.312 ± 0.058), while Table 1 reports 0.312 ± 0.034; this page follows Table 1 because it is the full tissue-by-metal results table and supports the range and exceedance columns.
• The Methods prose states an Hg RfD of 1.0 µg/kg/day, but Table 3 uses 0.1 µg/kg/day to calculate the reported THQs. This page preserves the Table 3 THQ values rather than recalculating them.
• The author-cited Hg MPL is from the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report on China’s contaminant standard; the Pb and Cd MPL references are EU amendment regulations 2015/1005 and 488/2014. This page reports those as author-cited benchmarks, not as current universal limits.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.