Chemical

  • Serious about sprouts in China; growers held after safety scare over bean sprouts

    Posted: February 27th, 2012 - 12:13am by Doug Powell

    The Shanghai Daily reports growers of tainted bean sprouts in Shanghai's Qingpu District have been detained, local authorities said yesterday.

    

Shanghai Food and Drug Administration said the bean sprouts found in unlicensed premises in thesites/default/files/amy_sprouts_guelph_05(24).jpgXianghuaqiao residential community contained illegal additives.
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    Officials gave no further details of what kind of additives they were and it was not known whether they were toxic or added in excessive amounts. 

All the contaminated bean sprouts have been destroyed and several suspects detained after local authorities acted on a tip-off from a resident.

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    Chemical, China, food safety, Sprout
  • At least they didn’t say safest food in the world; ‘Aussie food is perfectly safe to eat, says regulator’

    Posted: November 29th, 2011 - 4:41am by Doug Powell

    The ‘perfectly safe’ headline came from ABC News (that’s Australian, not American) riffing on a slightly more modest government press release, “Study confirms safety of Australia’s food supply.”

    Unfortunately, the study had nothing to do with microbial food safety.

    What it did have to do with was the 23rd Australian Total Diet Study, which examined the dietary exposure of the Australian population to 214 agricultural and veterinary chemicals, 9 contaminants, 12 mycotoxins, and 11 nutrients. A total of 92 foods and beverages commonly consumed in the Australian diet were sampled during January/February and June/July 2008 by Government food agencies in each state and territory in Australia. Foods and beverages were prepared to a table-ready state before being analysed.

    Dietary exposure was estimated by determining the concentration of the substance in the foods and beverages multiplied by the amount of food consumed by various age and gender groups, as reported in the two most recent Australian national nutrition surveys (NNS). The dietary exposure to agricultural and veterinary chemicals, contaminants and nutrients was assessed against available reference health standards to determine any potential human health and safety risks. Where there were no Australian health standards, internationally accepted reference health standards or Margins of Exposure (MOE) were used.

    The ATDS found that for agricultural and veterinary chemical residues estimated dietary exposures were all below the relevant reference health standards. This is consistent with the findings from previous ATDS. In addition, there were no detections of mycotoxins in any of the foods analysed.

    Estimated dietary exposure for contaminants were below the relevant health standards for all population groups at both the mean and 90th percentile consumption levels (high consumers).

    The 23rd ATDS confirms the current safety of the Australian food supply in terms of the levels of agricultural and veterinary chemicals, contaminants, selected mycotoxins and nutrients.

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    Australia, Chemical, food safety, total diet study, veterinary
  • New Zealand fruit and vegetable safety - good, but we'll make sure we do better

    Posted: December 20th, 2009 - 8:06pm by Doug Powell

    Every time there is a food safety outbreak with fresh fruits and vegetables, some journalist or lobby group will call up and say something like, “we want to do some sampling for E. coli or Salmonella and fresh produce.”

    And every time, Chapman or I will walk the person through the limitations with testing, especially in fresh produce.

    New studies by the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) highlight the limitations. In one, two out of 900 samples tested positive for Salmonella in lettuce, both from lettuces from the same grower.

    In a related study, none of the chemical residues detected were of health concern, although NZFSA principal advisor for chemicals Dr Paul Dansted says he is disappointed with results from this year’s Food Residue Surveillance Programme (FRSP), which targets food likely to show up problems. This year’s focus was on spinach, celery, ginger and garlic.

    “A significant number of samples had levels over the maximum residue limit (MRL) which is used for monitoring purposes, but it’s important to stress that dietary intake assessments on the non-compliant food showed none posed a health or food safety concern.”

    Eight out of 27 celery samples and four out of 24 spinach samples had residues that were over the limit. There were none over the limit in 50 samples of garlic, but ginger had 11 samples out of 39 over the limit.

    “Celery and spinach can be more vulnerable to persistence of chemical residues,” Dr Dansted says. “Because of their shape, residues that wash off in the rain can collect in the base of the plant. We expected to find some problems, but this is not good enough. We will take regulatory action to ensure better compliance in future.”

    Properly structured sampling programs are essential to validate that food safety programs are working. But testing is not enough.
     

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    Chemical, Fruit, Nzfsa, Pathogens, Produce, Residue, Vegetable, Zealand