Overview
The authors bought seven common vegetables at Dhaka’s Kawran Bazar wholesale market on four dates in August and September 2009 and measured lead, cadmium, chromium, nickel, copper and zinc by AAS on dried material. Tables II and III give each phase and the four-phase mean. The paper adds daily intake, hazard quotient and hazard index estimates.
Key numbers
- Lead, four-phase mean (mg/kg dry weight): cucumber 3.33, water spinach 0.83, cauliflower 0.83, Malabar spinach 3.33, green banana 2.50; tomato and red amaranth 0.001 with every phase at 0.00 (Tables II-III).
- Cadmium, four-phase mean (mg/kg dry weight): cucumber 0.25, tomato 0.33, red amaranth 1.00, Malabar spinach 2.25 (8.00 in phase 3) (Tables II-III).
- Chromium reached 26.67 mg/kg in red amaranth in phase 1 (Table II).
Methods (brief)
Edible parts were washed, oven-dried at 80 °C and ground; 250 mg was digested in nitric and perchloric acid and read by AAS. No reference material, recovery, blank or detection limit is reported.
Evidence Fitness
The phase values look like single determinations (many are multiples of 3.33), zeros have no stated detection limit, and the means average the zeros as zero. The 0.001 lead mean printed for tomato and red amaranth conflicts with all-zero phases and carries an integrity flag. Results are dry weight. Samples date from 2009, a decade before publication. Cucumber, tomato, cauliflower and the leafy greens bear directly on non-root vegetables. This is a separate sample set from Sultana et al. 2021 (fruit vegetables, same market), not a reprint.