Overview
The authors sampled marketed milk monthly in three cities of central Punjab over two years and measured aflatoxin M1 by immunoassay and lead and cadmium by graphite furnace atomic absorption. Most of the paper reports aflatoxin M1. Cadmium is given as a few city-level figures in the text; lead appears only in a bar chart.
Key numbers
- Cadmium, highest contamination: Lahore 0.037 ng/L, Faisalabad 0.034 ng/L, Jhang 0.031 ng/L (results text, p. 31).
- Cadmium, minimum: 0.020 ng/L in the lean milking season, Jhang (results text, p. 31).
- Lead: figure-only (Figure 3); no lead value is printed in the results.
Methods (brief)
One milliliter of milk was digested with nitric then perchloric acid and analyzed by graphite furnace atomic absorption. Results are said to be in ng/L. No detection limits, reference materials or recoveries are reported.
Evidence Fitness
A reasonably large sampling frame (360 samples) but very thin metal reporting: no table of metal results, no statistic named for the city values, and a unit conflict (ng/L in the text, µg/L and mg/L on the figure axes, and a claim that every sample exceeds 2.6 µg/kg cadmium, which ng/L values could not). Treat the cadmium values as unreliable in magnitude. The fat content of the milk is not stated, so this is a proxy for reduced-fat milk and does not measure it.