Heavy metal (HM) pollution has long been a significant source of environmental deterioration and a problem for the safety of food. Iraqis prefer rice over any other food, and since heavy metals have a direct impact on health, their traces in rice have drawn particular attention. Before cooking rice, it is usual in Iraq to wash and soak it. Some 55 varieties of imported and local rice were sampled from Erbil city markets in 2022 with the aim of determining the concentration of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb before and after soaking. Standard procedure of acid digestions was applied on the raw and soaked samples. The solutions were analyzed using ICPE-9820 Shimadzu. The mean concentrations of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (in mg/kg) in the rice samples before soaking was 0.655, 0.170, 0.160, 0.387, 0.489, respectively and after soaking 0.421, 0.109, 0.115, 0.124 and 0.336, respectively. The concentration of As and Pb was found to be beyond the optimum level of 0.2 mg/kg codex standards for rice; whereas Cd and Cr were within the proposed level of codex standards. Moreover, local rice showed higher concentration of (Cd and Cr), whereas (AS and Pb) concentration in imported rice was higher. Further, results validated that rice soaking can decrease levels of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (32.5%, 40.2%, 27.9%, 61.6% and 31.3%, respectively). These findings suggest that soaking as a kitchen practice has efficiency to evaporate metals and has a great influence on the reduction of toxic heavy metals and thus reduces exposure to toxic metals in rice
The ciliate species isolated from midgut and hindgut of Rough-tailed gecko Cyrtopodion scabrum (Heyden, 1827), identified as Nyctotherus hardwickii was collected from many regions of Baghdad, Iraq. The current study deals with a description and comparison of the morphology and morphometric characters of this species for the first time in Iraq.
A high percentage of existing buildings in Iraq are traditional buildings, yet there is approximately no such green building in Baghdad or other governorates. Most of these buildings require urgent upgrading to increase their performance (operationally, economically, and environmentally), also the building owners looking for identifying and implementing many of the green building measures to reduce the operational and maintenance costs of their buildings. The decision-makers need to support the possibility of achieving sustainable measures of existing building rating systems such as LEED or BREEAM, and that would require an optimization model. The goal of this study is to maximize the
The petrophysical analysis is very important to understand the factors controlling the reservoir quality and production wells. In the current study, the petrophysical evaluation was accomplished to hydrocarbon assessment based on well log data of four wells of Early Cretaceous carbonate reservoir Yamama Formation in Abu-Amood oil field in the southern part of Iraq. The available well logs such as sonic, density, neutron, gamma ray, SP, and resistivity logs for wells AAm-1, AAm-2, AAm-3, and AAm-5 were used to delineate the reservoir characteristics of the Yamama Formation. Lithologic and mineralogic studies were performed using porosity logs combination cross plots such as density vs. neutron cross plot and M-N mineralogy plot. Thes
... Show MoreThe Red Palm Weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier, 1790) is a devastating invasive pest of palm trees, invading the Iraqi date palm tree in 2015 for the first time in Safwan county, Basrah province. The Red Palm weevil has been categorized as a quarantine pest of date palm trees worldwide. In this study, a five years monitoring program has been achieved by scouting the invasive pest RPW population in Safwan county by using visual sampling and Pheromone baited traps.
The results indicated that the number of infested palms, increased from 12 trees in 2015 to 111 in 16 orchards in 2016. The number of the infested palms was minimized to 3 trees in the county in 2019 due to the management protocol of the Ministry of Agriculture
Abstract- Asymptomatic or clinically silent kidney stones are possibly serious because, in their expected passage, they may cause infection, obstruction and renal impairment. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of silent kidney stones in a sample of Baghdad population and consider how this value could affect the justification for a screening system. To our best knowledge, this is the first study of its kind conducted in Iraq. We investigated 714 consecutive patients who sustained an abdominal ultrasound at our hospital with further kidney screening. All these patients did not have clinical signs and symptoms of nephrolithiasis. Age, sex, the indication for ultrasound, the size, side, and the number of the disco
... Show MorePollen grains morphology have been studied for the wild species of the genus Erysimum L. which belong to Crucifereae family in Iraq. These species are E. filifolium Boiss. et Hausskn., E. oleifolium J. Gay, E. repandum L., E. eginense Hausskn. ex Bornm., E. aucheranum J. Gay, E. cheiranthoides L., E. alpestre Ky. ex Boiss., E. kurdicum Boiss. et Hausskn., E. tenellum DC., E. strophades Boiss., E. gladiiferum Boiss. et Hausskn., E. nasturtioides Boiss. et Hausskn. The study was performe by using light microscope . The study reveal that there was only one type of pollen grain named Tricoplate in all studied species . The study also demonstrated that there were differences among pollen grains morphology . The species E. kurdicum , E. alpestre
... Show MoreA total of 400 hard tick specimens (250 ♂♂, 150 ♀♀) were collected from 160 sheep Ovis aries Linnaeus, 1758 out of 200 samples examined in the different localities of Iraq, representing an infestation rate of 80% of the sheep. The results of the current research identified eight species of hard ticks belonging to two genera, Hyalomma C. L. Koch, 1844 and Rhipicephalus Koch,1844 and belonging to the Ixodidae family, as follows: Hyalomma anatolicum Koch, 1844, H. excavatum Koch, 1844, H. impeltatum Schulze & Schlottke, 1930, H. scupense Schulze, 1919, Rhipicephalus bursa Canastrini & Fanzago, 1878, R. camicasi Morel, Mouchet & Rodhain, 1976, R. sanguineus Latreille, 1806, and R. turanicus Pomerantsev, 1936. Molec
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