Histamine (?) Toxicity from Fish Products

Abstract

This chapter discusses about histamine toxicity from fish products, often called scombroid poisoning, generally involves the ingestion of scombroid fish from the families Scomberesocidae and Scombridae. Scombroid fish include saury, tuna, bonito, seerfish, butterfly kingfish, and mackerel. The free histidine can, under certain conditions, be decarboxylated by some bacteria to produce high levels of histamine. Scombroid fish poisoning clinically resembles that of histamine poisoning intoxication, although controversy still exists as to whether histamine ingested orally is actually toxic, whether histamine is the sole toxic factor or not. It is generally found at high concentrations in foods causing scombroid poisoning. “Samma sakuraboshi” was incriminated in many of the Japanese histamine and histamine–like fish poisonings. The incriminated fish generally contains histamine levels in excess of 100 mg%. No fish could be obtained for chemical analysis, but the outbreak was presumed to be caused by bacterial degradation of histidine to histamine. It is most likely that the histamine produced by autolysis was because of previous bacterial contamination or unsterile conditions during experimentation, thus enabling histamine production by the contaminating microorganisms. However, the use of ammonia levels as a freshness indicator becomes unreliable when fish are kept at a room temperatures of 20°C. Several studies of bacterial histidine decarboxylase have indicated that the addition of vitamins and coenzymes did not enhance histamine formation. Histamine formation in aerated cultures, achieved by the addition of bubbled gas, was much less than that from anaerobic and aerobic cultures.