Food Safety

Food can never be entirely safe. Food safety is threatened by numerous pathogens that cause a variety of foodborne diseases, algal toxins that cause mostly acute disease, and fungal toxins that may be acutely toxic but may also have chronic sequelae, such as teratogenic, immunotoxic, nephrotoxic, and estrogenic effects. Perhaps more worrisome, the industrial activities of the last century and more have resulted in massive increases in our exposure to toxic metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic, which now are present in the entire food chain and exhibit various toxicities. Industrial processes also released chemicals that, although banned a long time ago, persist in the environment and contaminate our food. These include organochlorine compounds, such as 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (dichlorodiphenyl dichloroethene) (DDT), other pesticides, dioxins, and dioxin-like compounds. DDT and its breakdown product dichlorophenyl dichloroethylene affect the developing male and female reproductive organs. In addition, there is increasing evidence that they exhibit neurodevelopmental toxicities in human infants and children. They share this characteristic with the dioxins and dioxin-like compounds. Other food contaminants can arise from the treatment of animals with veterinary drugs or the spraying of food crops, which may leave residues. Among the pesticides applied to food crops, the organophosphates have been the focus of much regulatory attention because there is growing evidence that they, too, affect t...