scope:

Introduction

The maximum immission values (MI values) for lithium presented below are intended to protect farm animals. Maximum immission values were derived from long-term lithium exposure experiments in order to determine the dose-time-response relationships in farm animals. MI values can only be established for farm animal species for which experiments were carried out. No data of this sort are available for goats and farmed game. However, since all investigated species responded uniformly to lithium burden in the feed, all species that were not tested can be expected to react in a similar way to lithium exposure as cattle, pigs, and hens [6; 8; 10; 11; 30; 37; 38]. MI values apply to the mentioned animal species kept under normal feeding conditions in livestock husbandry.

Combined effects of lithium with other elements or air pollutants can not be entirely ruled out; however, studies in goats have shown that such effects are very likely to be irrelevant [12].