Abstract
Mycotoxin contamination of foodstuffs is a serious food safety concern globally as the prolonged ingestion of these toxins has the tendency to worsen the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma. This study aimed at estimating ochratoxin A (OTA) and aflatoxin (AF) levels above international (European Food Safety Authority, EFSA) and local (Ghana Standards Authority, GSA) standards as well as the health risks associated with the consumption of maize (n = 180) sampled from six (6) regions representing the agro-ecological zones of Ghana. OTA and AF were measured with High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with a Fluorescence detector. Out of the 180 samples analyzed for total aflatoxins (AFtotal), 131/180 tested positive and 127 (70.50%) exceeded the limits of EFSA and ranged 4.27–441.02 µg/kg. While for GSA, 116 (64.44%) of samples exceeded this limit and ranged between 10.18 and 441.02 µg/kg. For OTA, 103/180 tested positive and 94 (52.22%) of samples between the range 4.00–97.51 µg/kg exceeded the tolerable limit of EFSA, whereas 89 (49.44%) and were in the range of 3.30–97.51 µg/kg exceeded the limits of GSA. Risk assessment values for total aflatoxins (AFtotal) ranged between 50 and 1150 ng/kg bw/day, 0.4–6.67, 0–0.0323 aflatoxins ng/kg bw/day and 1.62–37.15 cases/100,000 person/year for Estimated Daily Intake (EDI), Margin of Exposure (MOE), Average Potency, and Cancer Risks respectively. Likewise, ochratoxin (OTA) values were in the ranges of 8.6 × 10–3–450 ng/kg bw/day, 0.05–2059.97, 0–0.0323 ochratoxins ng/kg bw/day and 2.78 × 10–4–14.54 cases/100,000 person/year. Consumption of maize posed adverse health effects in all age categories of the locations studied since the calculated MOE values were less than 10,000.
Highlights
Maize (Zea mays L), a principal cereal extensively consumed[1] around the globe is exceedingly prone to fungal infection by many toxigenic fungal species
For the Upper East region representing the Sudan Savanna zone (Fig. 1), the range of values was 0–106.18 μg/kg for Total aflatoxins. 32.84, 30.35, and 668.51 μg/kg were recorded from the summary statistics as mean, median, and variance, respectively, while 0.83 and 0.89 were recorded as skewness and kurtosis respectively which implied a symmetrical and normally distributed data for Total Aflatoxins (AFtotal) (Table 3)
Values of 48.93, 25.09, and 4214.84 μg/kg were recorded for mean, median, and variance, respectively, while the skewness and kurtosis were 2.14 and 5.35 respectively and showed that the data set of Total aflatoxins (AFtotal) obtained in this zone was asymmetrical and heavy-tailed (Table 5)
Summary
Maize (Zea mays L), a principal cereal extensively consumed[1] around the globe is exceedingly prone to fungal infection by many toxigenic fungal species. Aflatoxins are fungal metabolites produced by strains of Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus They are by and large the most well-known mycotoxins owing to their persistence in the environment and the ubiquitous nature of their contaminants. The evidence that mycotoxins can have adverse health effects on humans and animals has led many countries to set up standards for maximum levels of total aflatoxins and ochratoxins in food products intended for both human and animal c onsumption[25]. These permissible levels are almost excruciating especially in developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. A low-dose extrapolation approach introduced by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) in 1997 and the margin of exposure (MOE) method proposed at the 64th JECFA meeting in 200527 were both recommended and have been widely used worldwide[28,29] to assess the risk of dietary exposure to mycotoxins
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