Subhanullah et al. 2024 - Heavy metals in Panjkora River fish and water, Pakistan
This Scientific Reports paper measured Fe, Pb, Mn, Zn, Cd, and As in Panjkora River water and in edible fish muscle. The abstract reports a highest fish Pb concentration of 2.028 mg/kg and a highest water Pb concentration of 0.060 mg/L. The routeable food matrix is freshwater fish muscle; water results are environmental context unless used for source-apportionment pages.
Key numbers
Source-reported fish and risk values include:
| Metric | Reported value |
|---|---|
| Highest Pb in water | 0.060 mg/L |
| Highest Pb in fish | 2.028 mg/kg |
| Fish vector reported at one location | Fe 0.43, Pb 2.08, Mn 0.29, Zn 1.27, Cd 0.13, As 0.12 mg/kg |
| Mean EDI for Pb | 0.318 mg/kg bw/day |
| Mean EDI for Cd | 0.027 mg/kg bw/day |
| Mean EDI for As | 0.019 mg/kg bw/day |
| Mean HRI for Pb | 10.56 |
| Mean HRI for Cd | 26.85 |
| Mean HRI for As | 62.91-62.99 reported across abstract/results |
| TCR for Pb | 0.002862 |
| TCR for Cd | 0.0162 |
| TCR for As | 0.0285 |
The paper reports HRI > 1 for As, Pb, and Cd, while Fe, Zn, and Mn are below 1 in the summary discussion.
Methods (brief)
One fish and one water sample were collected from each of seven Panjkora River locations. Fish muscle was dissected, oven dried at 80 C, digested with nitric acid/perchloric acid, and analyzed by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Health-risk calculations used a 10 g/person/day fish intake assumption and source-reported fish concentrations.
Implications
The source supports Pakistan freshwater fish occurrence context for total/source-reported As, Cd, and Pb, especially for riverine fish from a polluted watershed. It should not be routed to infant formula despite the auto-fetch filename.
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Verification notes
The OCR of several figure labels is noisy and the species name appears as both Crossocheilus aplocheilus and Crossocheilus diplocheilus in the PDF text. The DOI and article metadata are clear. Arsenic is not speciated; route as total/source-reported As, not inorganic arsenic.
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.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 4039d20 | 2026-06-10 | scope: broaden ingest to the full upstream+downstream literature (marine, atmospheric, attribution, exposure, toxicology) — inclusion is the default |