Research Publications (Food Safety)

Abstract The marine finfish and crustaceans contribute immensely to human nutrition. Harvesting marine food‐fish to meet the global demand has become a challenge due to reduction of the fishery areas and food safety hazards associated with increased pre‐harvest and post‐harvest contaminations. The causes of low fish availability and contaminations were reviewed following the published literature from 2000 to 2023.

Pesticide use has grown rapidly in West Africa over the past decades. Regulatory capacity has not kept pace with the rapid proliferation of pesticide products and on-farm use. As a result, health and environmental impacts from the growing use of pesticides, despite their potential importance to food safety, remain largely unmonitored, underreported, and poorly understood by key stakeholders.

Arsenic (As) contamination in agricultural soils has become a great threat to the sustainable development of agriculture and food safety. Although a lot of approaches have been proposed for dealing with soil As contamination, they are not practical in crop production due to high cost, time-taking, or operational complexity. The rapid development of nanotechnology appears to provide a novel solution to soil As contamination.

Atrazine (ATZ) is an agricultural pesticide for controlling field weeds. ATZ accumulates in many crops, posing high risks to crop production and food safety. Characterizing one of the novel rice MT genes named Oryza sativa atrazine-responsive methyltransferase (OsARM) showed that the expression of OsARM was associated with DNA demethylation (hypomethylation) in its promoter region.

The industrialization of the agri-food industry and resultant decrease in the number of people employed on farms has contributed to a knowledge gap among consumers about food production processes. A commonly reported concern of dairy consumers is the use of antibiotics in dairy animals, even though these drugs are an important tool for promoting animal health and welfare and food safety.

For decades antibiotics have been used in poultry rearing to support high levels of production. Nevertheless, several problems have arisen because of the misuse of antibiotics (i.e., antibiotic resistance, residues in animal products, environmental pollution). Thus, the European Union (EU) as well as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) promote action plans to diminish the use of antibiotics in animal production. Alternatives to antibiotics have been studied.

In this study, a practical and excellent method was used to determine the famoxadone and cymoxanil via high-performance liquid chromatography equipped utilizing ultraviolet detector lamp (HPLC-UV) for investigating the dissipation behavior and residue distribution of famoxadone and cymoxanil in cucumber and soil ecosystem. The limit of quantification (LOQS) of famoxadone and cymoxanil in cucumber were 0.50, 1.00, 2.00 and 0.05, 0.50, 1.00 mg kg−1 in soil, respectively.

Background Pyraclostrobin and picoxystrobin are two representative pesticides of strobilurins used to treat cucumber downy mildew, which have raised issues of food safety and human health. A new formulation containing these two compounds is being prepared for marketing in China.

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND Cyromazine and acetamiprid are widely applied as pesticides in agriculture, causing increasing concerns about their residues in crops. In this study, cyromazine, acetamiprid and their mixture were applied to cowpea to investigate their degradation dynamics and perform a dietary risk assessment.