Iqbal, S; Hussain, A; Shaheen, MA; Hussain, I; Batool, F; Sher, M
The poultry feed ingredients, contaminated by Lead (Pb) from different sources, may pose serious threats towards health of bird as well as consumers. Toxicity of Pb requires accurate quantification from poultry samples, which in turn is dependent on efficiency of digestion procedure. Therefore, aim of this study was to compare three main digestion methods; microwave-assisted wet digestion, wet-acid digestion on hot plate and dry ashing mineralization in muffle furnace for the maximum recovery of Pb from 28 poultry feed samples of 7 commercial brands from Pakistan. Novelty in wet-acid digestion on hot plate lies in applying 6 different compositions of nitric acid with oxidants and other mineral acids i.e. hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), perchloric (HClO4), hydrochloric (HCl), and hydrofluoric (HF) acids. The concentration of Pb in samples was found to be in the range of 43-58.5, 26-35.5, 17-30, 11-18.5, 22-30.5, 27-37.5, 36-48 and 2-6.5 mg/kg by 1MW (microwave-assisted wet digestion), 2AW (wet digestion with HNO3 and H2O2 mixture), 2BW (wet digestion with mixture of HNO3 and HClO4), 2CW (wet digestion with aqua regia), 2DW (wet digestion with reverse aqua regia), 2EW (wet digestion with mixture of HNO3 and H2SO4), 2FW (wet digestion with mixture of HNO3 and HF) and 3DD (Dry digestion in Muffle furnace), respectively. The results were subjected to statistical analysis i.e. ANOVA, which showed significant differences among all the digestion methods and cluster analysis, which confirmed the similarity between 2FW (wet digestion with mixture of nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid) and microwave-assisted digestion method.