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ABSTRACT
The research focused on risk assessment of some heavy metals in common vegetables and fish sold on open markets in three towns of Zambia. The mean level of heavy metals ranged as follows (mg/kg): 1.9 to 662.7, 3.0 to 3472.3 and 2.0 to 1698.7 of cadmium (lowest) and aluminium (highest) for samples from Kabwe, Kitwe and Lusaka, respectively. Statistical analysis indicated that the concentrations of samples from Kitwe and Lusaka towns were similar, P > 0.05. However, there were noteworthy differences in the mean amounts of heavy metals in samples from Kitwe and Kabwe, and samples from Kabwe and Lusaka towns, P < .0167. The health risk analysis indicates possible non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks to the consumer. This is because the hazard index (HI) for all metals in all samples from all towns was greater than 1 and the cancer risk (CR) for cadmium was above 10−4 in all samples from all towns.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Science and Technology Council of Zambia under the trilateral collaborative agreement grant no. NSTC/101/6/8, and National Research foundation of South Africa under the trilateral collaborative agreement grant no. 118473.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Authorship contribution statement
Foster Miyanza: Data curation; Methodology; Formal analysis; Investigation; Validation; Software; Writing-original draft; Writing-review & editing. Thapelo Ramalepe & Mokgaetji Monyai: Methodology; Formal analysis; Validation. Eutilério Chaúque: Conceptualization; Writing-review & editing; Supervision. Imasiku Nyambe & Luke Chimuka: Conceptualization; Methodology; Writing-review & editing; Funding acquisition; Supervision; Project administration.