Notice of RetractionHeavy Metals in Rivers of Shanghai Xuhui District and Their Potentiality in Health Risk Assessment

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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The objectives of this study are to illustrate the pollution characterizations of heavy metals in rivers of Xuhui District, Shanghai, China and assess the potential health risk. Water samples were collected from four sites along the rivers in recent years and six metals were determined using proposed standard methods of China. It is found that the total heavy metal concentrations displayed great spatial and temporal characterizations. Longhuagang River is the most seriously polluted river where the heavy metals may come from the dust of the concrete plant nearby. Coahejing River and Dianpuhe River are slightly contaminated, showing an increasing tendency of total heavy metal pollution. The heavy metal pollution is reduced to some degree in 2008 and 2009 owing to the implementation of strict environmental measures by local government. Heavy metal pollution index (HPI) has been applied to assess the health risk of heavy metal pollution. All the selected metal concentrations are much lower than guideline values and Hg, Cu and Zn are regarded as the major pollutants in the river. The mean value of HPI in each sampling site is 12.66 and is well below the critical index limit of 100. The results indicate that the rivers in Xuhui District has little health risk with respect to heavy metals though slight pollution has been found in a few river sections.