Health risks of heavy metal exposure through vegetable consumption near a large-scale Pb/Zn smelter in central China

Levels of heavy metals in soil and vegetables and associated health risks in Mojo area, Ethiopia

“…It can be clearly seen that both vegetable samples considered in this study are highly loaded with Hg residues and possibly imposing significant health risk to the population consuming the vegetables. The levels of Hg obtained in this study was observed to dangerously exceed the maximum limit value in vegetables as reported by Li et al, [53] and Liu et al [73].…”

“…Hazard Index (HI). It has been documented that the individual health risks of the analysed heavy metals in the same vegetable are accumulative and that is expressed as hazard index (HI) [43,45,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Accordingly, the HI of target metals considered in this study are calculated using Eq (4) [52,53].…”

“…However, an HI value of > 1.0 indicates potential health impact implication. A serious chronic health impact has been suggested for HI > 10.0 [52,53]. The target cancer risk (TCR).…”

“…The levels of Cr, Hg, Ni and Co in the soil sample under tomato cultivation were found to be 36. 23 [44] c [11] d [54] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227883.t003 [53] c European union standards [54] d Dutch target value [73] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227883.t004…”

“…The target cancer risk due to the exposure to As, Pb, Cd, Cr and Ni through the consumption of contaminated cabbage and tomato are presented in Table 7. From the data in Table 7, it can be seen that the TCR of As due to the consumption of tomato and cabbage were 9.10 x 10 −4 and 2.70 x 10 −3 , respectively, indicating the high risk of exposure to cancer due to the consumption of these vegetables from the area as the values were exceeded the maximum threshold value of 1 x 10 −4 [11,45,48,50,52,53,73,[77][78][79]. The corresponding TCR of Pb were 9.70 x 10-6 and 2.02 x 10-5, respectively due to the consumption tomato and cabbage.…”