Ulusoy 2023 - Toxic metals in global canned tuna

Ulusoy measured cadmium, lead, total mercury, and total arsenic in canned tuna purchased from supermarkets in 36 countries. The study used ICP-MS and reported country-of-purchase means for Cd, Pb, Hg, total As, and a calculated inorganic-arsenic surrogate. Inorganic arsenic was not directly measured; it was estimated as 3% of total As for the risk calculations.

Key numbers

Table 6 reports developed/developing-country summaries in µg/g ww:

Tables 4-5 report country-level concentration means. Selected high or source-highlighted values include:

The results section states that Cd and Hg values were below the cited limit values in all samples, and that only Pb concentrations were found above limit values in samples purchased from England, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The abstract states that Hg THQ values were above the source’s safe-limit criterion for higher-frequency consumers and that calculated iAs TCR indicated carcinogenic risk when consuming more than one canned-tuna meal per week.

Methods (brief)

Canned tuna samples were randomly purchased from supermarket chains in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania. The liquid medium was poured off before digestion. Approximately 0.5 g sample was digested with 7 mL 65% nitric acid and 1 mL 30% hydrogen peroxide in a Milestone Ethos D microwave system, then diluted to 50 mL. As, Cd, Pb, and Hg were measured by Perkin Elmer NexION 1000 ICP-MS. Certified reference material ERM-CE278k was analyzed, with recoveries of 102.67% for Cd, 108.39% for Pb, 108.45% for Hg, and 98.17% for As.

Implications

This source contributes broad global occurrence data for canned tuna. It is useful for canned-fish and predatory-marine-fish routing, but the arsenic and mercury species must stay constrained: arsenic concentration values are total As, and mercury concentration values are total Hg. The paper’s calculated iAs and risk outputs are source assumptions, not direct inorganic-arsenic measurements.

Verification notes

• PDF text extracted with pdftotext -layout; title page, methods, Tables 3-6, results, and conclusions were readable.
• DOI 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.114518 matched this existing source page. The manual-fetch PDF has the same SHA-256 as the prior raw/studies copy, so this edit is a merge-enhancement rather than a new duplicate page.
• Table 6 group means and EDI values were checked against the extracted text. Selected Table 4-5 country rows were checked directly. A prior page transposition was corrected: England’s Pb is 0.64 +/- 0.01, while 1.28 +/- 0.00 is England’s total As.
• Units are preserved as µg/g ww for concentration values and µg/kg bw/day for EDI values. No unit conversion was performed.
• Speciation: total As and total Hg were measured. Calculated iAs is a 3% total-As assumption used for risk assessment and is not treated as measured iAs occurrence. Hg is not reported as MeHg.
• Brand firewall: although brands were sampled, this page reports country/group summaries only and does not attach brand names to contamination values.
• Frontmatter product and ingredient slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; no new slug was invented.

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.