Food Contaminants (food + contaminant)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Book review: Food Contaminants: Mycotoxins and Food Allergens.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 5 2009
ACS Symposium Series 100
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Clostridium difficile in food,innocent bystander or serious threat?

CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY AND INFECTION, Issue 1 2010
J. S. Weese
Abstract Clostridium difficile is a critically important cause of disease in humans, particularly in hospitalized individuals. Three major factors have raised concern about the potential for this pathogen to be a cause of foodborne disease: the increasing recognition of community-associated C. difficile infection, recent studies identifying C. difficile in food animals and food, and similarities in C. difficile isolates from animals, food and humans. It is clear that C. difficile can be commonly found in food animals and food in many regions, and that strains important in human infections, such as ribotype 027/NAP1/toxinotype III and ribotype 078/toxinotype V, are often present. However, it is currently unclear whether ingestion of contaminated food can result in colonization or infection. Many questions remain unanswered regarding the role of C. difficile in community-associated diarrhoea: its source when it is a food contaminant, the infective dose, and the association between ingestion of contaminated food and disease. The significant role of this pathogen in human disease and its potential emergence as an important community-associated pathogen indicate that careful evaluation of different sources of exposure, including food, is required, but determination of the potential role of food in C. difficile infection may be difficult. [source]


Cover Picture: Electrophoresis 7'09

ELECTROPHORESIS, Issue 10 2009
Article first published online: 13 MAY 200
Issue no. 10 is a special issue on CE-MS edited by Phillipe Schmitt-Kopplin. It has three review articles describing recent advances in fundamental concepts, instrumentation, food safety, food quality, trace analysis of environmental pollutants and food contaminants, as well as many other applications. In addition, the special issue consists of 22 research articles on various topics of CE-MS, including technical and method developments, residue analysis in food and environmental applications and applications in diagnostic and life sciences. [source]


Impact of inter-individual differences in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics on safety evaluation

FUNDAMENTAL & CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY, Issue 6 2004
J.L.C.M. Dorne
Abstract Safety evaluation aims to assess the dose,response relationship to determine a dose/level of exposure for food contaminants below which no deleterious effect is measurable that is ,without appreciable health risk' when consumed daily over a lifetime. These safe levels, such as the acceptable daily intake (ADI) have been derived from animal studies using surrogates for the threshold such as the no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL). The extrapolation from the NOAEL to the human safe intake uses a 100-fold uncertainty factor, defined as the product of two 10-fold factors allowing for human variability and interspecies differences. The 10-fold factor for human variability has been further subdivided into two factors of 100.5 (3.16) to cover toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics and this subdivsion allows for the replacement of an uncertainty factor with a chemical-specific adjustment factor (CSAF) when compound-specific data are available. Recently, an analysis of human variability in pharmacokinetics for phase I metabolism (CYP1A2, CYP2A6, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, CYP2D6, CYP2E1, CYP3A4, hydrolysis, alcohol dehydrogenase), phase II metabolism (N-acetyltransferase, glucuronidation, glycine conjugation, sulphation) and renal excretion was used to derive pathway-related uncertainty factors in subgroups of the human population (healthy adults, effects of ethnicity and age). Overall, the pathway-related uncertainty factors (99th centile) were above the toxicokinetic uncertainty factor for healthy adults exposed to xenobiotics handled by polymorphic metabolic pathways (and assuming the parent compound was the proximate toxicant) such as CYP2D6 poor metabolizers (26), CYP2C19 poor metabolizers (52) and NAT-2 slow acetylators (5.2). Neonates were the most susceptible subgroup of the population for pathways with available data [CYP1A2 and glucuronidation (12), CYP3A4 (14), glycine conjugation (28)]. Data for polymorphic pathways were not available in neonates but uncertainty factors of up to 45 and 9 would allow for the variability observed in children for CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 metabolism, respectively. This review presents an overview on the history of uncertainty factors, the main conclusions drawn from the analysis of inter-individual differences in metabolism and pharmacokinetics, the development of pathway-related uncertainty factors and their use in chemical risk assessment. [source]


Injector-internal thermal desorption from edible oils performed by programmed temperature vaporizing (PTV) injection

JOURNAL OF SEPARATION SCIENCE, JSS, Issue 15 2006
Anja Fankhauser-Noti
Abstract Injector-internal thermal desorption is a promising technique for the analysis of a wide range of food components (e. g., flavors) or food contaminants (e. g., solvent residues, pesticides, or migrants from packaging materials) in edible oils and fats or fatty food extracts. Separation from the fatty matrix occurs during injection. Using programmed temperature vaporizing (PTV) injection, the oily sample or sample extract was deposited on a small pack of glass wool from which the components of interest were evaporated and transferred into the column in splitless mode, leaving behind the bulk of the matrix. Towards the end of the analysis, the oil was removed by heating out the injector and backflushing the precolumn. The optimization dealt with the gas supply configuration enabling backflush, the injector temperature program (sample deposition, desorption, and heating out), separation of the sample liquid from the syringe needle and positioning it on a support, deactivation of the support surface, holding the plug of fused silica wool by a steel wire, and the analytical sequence maintaining adsorptivity at the desorption site low. It was performed for a mixture of poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) plasticizers in oil or fatty food. Using MS in SIM, the detection limit was below 0.1 mg/kg for plasticizers forming single peaks and 1 mg/kg for mixtures like diisodecyl phthalate. For plasticizers, RSDs of the concentrations were below 10%; for the slip agents, oleamide and erucamide, it was 12%. The method of incorporating PTV injection was used for about one year for determining the migration from the gaskets of lids for glass jars into oily foods. [source]