Overview
Salamat and Shahbaz bought 40 broiler chickens in five Lahore market areas and measured lead and cadmium in the liver and kidneys by flame atomic absorption spectrometry. Although the title says “broiler meat”, only the two organs were analysed, not muscle. The paper prints a value for each bird and organ plus descriptive statistics by market area, and reports no significant differences between areas.
Key numbers
- Kidney lead, area means 6.94 to 7.55 µg/g; highest single value “8.5±0.533” µg/g (Tables 4.1 and 4.6).
- Kidney cadmium, area means 25.94 to 26.22 µg/g; maximum 27.75 µg/g (Table 4.7).
- Liver lead, area means 5.66 to 7.10 µg/g; liver cadmium, area means 25.66 to 26.16 µg/g (Tables 4.8 and 4.9).
Methods (brief)
Two-gram organ samples digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide (1:1) on a hot plate at 120 °C, diluted to 50 mL and read by flame AAS at the PCSIR laboratory. A standard and a blank were run after every five samples. No detection limits, certified reference material or recoveries are reported, and the wet or dry basis is not stated.
Evidence Fitness
Forty birds across five market areas, with per-bird values. Quality assurance is thin. The cadmium levels (about 26 µg/g in both organs) are far above what is usually reported for broiler offal, and identical value and standard-deviation pairs recur across many birds and both organs, so the dataset should be weighted cautiously. The methods text refers to “slaughtering the rats”, an apparent drafting error. Liver and kidney are not chicken meat: this paper is at most a proxy for chicken-broth and chicken-noodle-soup, and those thin pages are not linked.