Hunting, sports shooting and fishing are responsible on the one hand for environmental contamination by this heavy metal, highly toxic to the cardiovascular system, kidneys and the central nervous system.
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Game consumers are exposed to unsuspected quantities of lead, likely to present a health risk. Work published Monday August 22 in Revue Plos One detail, for the first time, the presence of ammunition microfragments found on feather game. “Hunting leads often fragment to the impact in the body, leaving small lead particles that are difficult to detect and eliminate by consumers in meat,” write the Biologist Rhys Green, professor at the University of Cambridge ( United Kingdom), and its co-authors, recalling that “chronic exposure to lead levels, even low, is associated with negative health effects”. The most vulnerable people are children and pregnant women.
British researchers spent eight pheasants’ carcasses on X -rays and identified in each, on average, around forty pieces of diameter less than 2 mm. The resolution of their instrument that limited detection to fragments greater than 0.07 mm, the authors do not exclude that the larger number could be observed. In addition, the dispersion of these fragments in the carcasses is done at a distance from the wounds inflicted on the animal by the ammunition. It makes it difficult, for the lover of venison, “to eliminate them without losing a large part of the meat otherwise usable”.
By considering only smaller debris than a millimeter – the most likely to be ingested -, the authors consider that average of each pheasant contains 3.4 milligrams of lead that can be absorbed by the consumer. An evaluation which seems not very disturbing, but which nevertheless exceeds the values tolerated in Europe in far far in the breeding meat – the equivalent 25 micrograms of lead for a portion of 250 grams.
“Until a dozen years ago, the public health authorities thought that there was a level of safe lead in food, explains Mr. Green. But new studies, especially those concerning The effects of lead on the intelligence of young children, have changed them. Now, the health authorities affirm that there is no safety threshold. “The risks identified by the authors relate less to the population General – Exposed to lead by many other sources (old paintings, unsanitary habitats, pipes, etc.) – than on regular game consumers. These would be around 5 million people in the European Union and in the United Kingdom, and would consume them at least once a week, according to the study authors.
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