Food News

Alert notices from RASFF concerning food: Some unusual findings: worth a review of sampling plans

alert

In this section we repeated alert notices from the RASFF system of the European commission issued in the previous month, which we thought to be noteworthy and of interest to our clients.

 

 

In the meantime you have recognized, that the monthly listing became longer and longer. A repetition in AGROLAB RADAR binds meanwhile many hours, so we decided to stop excerpting this information. In addition the alerts did not differ very much from month to month. The typical threats were also deriving from the known countries. Nuts, raisins and dried fruit with mycotoxin contamination from South of Europe and Middle East countries & USA, salmonella in chicken breast from South America, Poland, and numerous spices and seeds with salmonella, and always often a too high sulfite content in dried fruit from Turkey etc.

 

You can analyze the RASFF-site conveniently by yourself using several filter options and limit the notification to those which are of direct interest to your business.

We from AGROLABGROUP will screen the RASFF listing week by week also in future. From now on we will select and focus only a few really surprising or challenging findings in our opinion, that we will present in this section. Last month we found the following serious alerts noteworthy. 

 

  • Diarrhoeic Shellfish Poisoning (DSP) toxins: (okadaic acid: >320 µg/kg; dinophystoxins: <40 and 71 µg/kg - ppb) in live cockles (Cerastoderma edule) from Portugal (reported by ES)
  • Ethylene oxide: in rice crackers from China (reported by NL); in Tandoori Masala barbeque spice blend reported by NL; in organic guar gum from India; in food supplement from Slovenia
  • Heavy metals: Mercury in thawed vacuum-packed swordfish loins and smoked Marlin fillet (2x) from Spain
  • Listeria monocytogenes: in meat preparations from Belgium; in grill cheese from Austria;
  • 3-MCPD, glycidyl esters: in wafers from Turkey (reported by DE); in banana cream biscuits and in strawberry cream cookies from Saudi Arabia via the Netherlands
  • Mycotoxins: Aflatoxins in nutmeg from Indonesia; Aflatoxins in organic popcorn maize from Turkey; Aflatoxins in water-melon seeds from the Netherlands and Lebanon; Ochratoxin A in organic oats from Lithuania (reported by DE)
  • Pesticides: in pickled vine leaves from Egypt (reported by DE); Chlorpyrifos in dried mu-err mushrooms from Vietnam (reported by DE)
    non-approved Chlorpyriphos 0,9 mg/kg (0,01mg/kg) in dried organic figs from Turkey
  • Pyrrolizidine alkaloids: in oregano from Turkey (4879 µg/kg - ppb)
  • Salmonella: in black pepper from Brazil 6x (reported by NL and DE); in dried oregano from Chile;
  • Vibrio parahaemolyticus: in frozen whole giant tiger shrimps (Penaeus monodon) from Bangladesh (reported by FR)

 

 

Author: Dr. Frank Mörsberger