Abstract:
Background: Most infant formulas contain much higher concentrations of minerals and
trace elements than those of breast milk. Infant formula milk Powdered milks are dried milk
prepared by drying the concentrated liquid milks.
Objective: The main objective of the study was to determine and safety assessment of major
chemical toxicants in infant formula milk brand in Jimma town.
Method: Samples of infant formulas was collected from different supermarkets. After
preparation of samples, different digestion procedures were tested by varying reagent
volumes, digestion time, temperature and amount of the sample to develop a procedure that
consumes less regent volumes, short digestion time, low temperature of digestion and smaller
mass of the sample. The optimal procedure was required 4:00 hours and consumed 3 ML
HNO3 and 2 ML HClO4 to completely digest 0.5 g of powdered infant formula samples. The
accuracy of the optimized procedure was evaluated by analyzing the digest of the spiked
samples with standard solution.
Results: Based on the findings of this study from the analyzed brands of infant formulas, the
most abundant toxic metal among the element is Cd followed by Cu and Cr. And also Cr and
Cd not detected in Anchor but relatively highly identified in NAN which is 1.30 and 3.39
respectively. High concentration of Cu identified in Homilac followed by Anchor. Cu is the
only toxic metals found in Anchor.
Conclusion: The findings of this study investigated the presence of cadmium, chromium and
copper in the infant formulas and their estimated daily intakes were less than their respective
safety limits. Furthermore, the health risk indices of both metals were below the threshold of
1 at mean exposure, which implies low health risks of these metals to the general infants
upon consumption of the formula feeding.
