02 to 0.29 mg/kg

( Table 3) and arsenic species in rice based baby foods were the same as in long grain rice (DMA, As(III), As(V)). We were able to measure the amount of inorganic arsenic in four out of ten porridge powders. DNA Damage inhibitor The average inorganic arsenic content of these four samples was 0.11 mg/kg, the highest quantified inorganic arsenic level was 0.21 mg/kg and the lowest level was 0.07 mg/kg. In one sample, the level was above the limit of detection. The Pearson correlation test shows a correlation between total and inorganic arsenic levels in porridge powders with a confidence level of 99% (p = 0.000). The Spearman correlation test also detected a correlation, but at a confidence level of 95% (p = 0.025). The results for total and inorganic arsenic in long grain rice samples are in line with results obtained in other studies (Heitkemper et al., 2001, Sun et al., 2008 and Zavala et al., 2008). The distribution

of species has also been found to be similar to those in other surveys (Ackerman et al., 2005, Heitkemper et al., 2001, Nishimura et al., 2010, Williams et al., 2005, Zavala et al., 2008 and Zhu et al., 2008). However, there is very little information available on the total and inorganic arsenic levels in rice-based baby food. Our results for baby food are in line with the data of Meharg et al., in which the median inorganic arsenic level of 17 rice-only baby food was 0.11 mg/kg (Meharg et al., 2008). The major difference with Proteases inhibitor our study is that we analysed rice based baby foods which contained also other ingredients in addition to rice. Our data is in line with recently

published inorganic arsenic levels in some rice based baby food (Llorente-Mirandes, Calderón, López-Sánchez, next Centrich, & Rubio, 2012). One of the major advantages of our method is that it permits quantification of inorganic arsenic or arsenic species in everyday routine analysis. Many methods developed in arsenic speciation are only applicable for research purposes. The disadvantages of using carbonate buffers as an eluents are long retention time and the peak broadening with arsenate (Raber et al., 2012). These are due to high pH which leads to additional deprotonation of the arsenate anion. Irrespective of these problems, one achieves good repeatability and reproducibility with this method (Table 1). One interesting observation is that reproducibility improves from the first day to the third day of analysis which may be a result of the gradual accommodation of the instrumentation to the HPLC–ICP-MS-mode. Thus, we estimate that the reproducibility of the method would be around 4% if a dedicated HPLC–ICP-MS instrument could be used. Furthermore, trueness of the method is very good with regard to the validation data as well as from the results from several interlaboratory comparisons. The analysis time is 45 min which can be considered as long.