Overview
Szkoda and colleagues report five years of Polish national residue monitoring for lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic in muscle and liver of slaughtered cattle, pigs, horses and poultry and in raw cow milk. Table 1 gives the mean, median and maximum for each tissue on a wet-weight basis. Only 48 of 6865 samples (0.7%) exceeded maximum levels, mostly for lead and cadmium.
Key numbers
- Raw cow milk (n = 736): lead mean 0.002, median <0.002, maximum 0.190 mg/kg; cadmium mean 0.001, maximum 0.008 mg/kg (Table 1).
- Pig muscle (n = 2345): lead mean 0.014, maximum 0.376 mg/kg, 6 samples above the limit (Table 1).
- Horse muscle (n = 758): cadmium mean 0.052, median 0.023, maximum 1.12 mg/kg, 22 samples above 0.20 mg/kg (Table 1).
- Cattle liver: cadmium mean 0.119, maximum 10.02 mg/kg (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
Lead and cadmium by graphite furnace atomic absorption after dry ashing at 450 °C; arsenic by hydride generation atomic absorption; mercury by a direct mercury analyser. The laboratory is the national reference laboratory and reports satisfactory EU proficiency test z-scores; no reference-material recoveries are printed. Cadmium detection limit 0.001 mg/kg; mercury and arsenic quantification limits 0.001 and 0.002 mg/kg.
Evidence Fitness
Large official monitoring dataset with summary statistics per tissue, but no per-region or per-year table values (yearly means are figure-only). Milk is raw farm milk with fat level not stated, so it is a proxy for half-and-half, skim milk and semi-skimmed milk, none of which were measured. Pig muscle is unspecified pork meat, a proxy for pork chop and for the pork in canned pork and beans; no cut or canned product was analysed.