Level of heavy metals (cu,as,cr,pb and cd) and exposure Risks in infant formula milk brands in jimma

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.