Filth in Foods: Implications for Health

Abstract

Filth is defined in this context as any objectionable matter contributed by animal contamination of a food product, such as insect, rodent or bird matter, or any other objectionable matter contributed by insanitary conditions. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act insists upon high levels of sanitary practice in the food industry as a means of both preventing filth from getting into food and preventing any disease that may be associated with such filth. There are three categories of pest-food relationships: (a) accidental (e.g., bird feathers, bat feces), (b) opportunistic (e.g., foraging by ants, rats), and (c) obligatory (i.e., pest survival largely dependent upon food gathered and cached by man). Food pests or fragments thereof may act as direct agents of disease by causing dermatosis, allergy, myiasis, and toxicogenic effects (the latter as yet unproved in man). Food pests may also serve as mechanical or biological vectors of human pathogens. In contrast to the sort of mainline vectoring done by malaria mosquitoes, food pests, where they are involved at all, usually transmit pathogens only along pathways that are peripheral and supplementary to epidemiologically more important routes of transmission.