The goal of food safety policy is to protect consumers while ensuring the effective functioning of the market. Every product placed on the market must meet the food safety standards specified in the regulations.
The standards do not refer only to the basic characteristics, but also to the legally determined amount of substances that can be harmful to the health and well-being of consumers.
Due to modern and progressive agricultural and food industry, it is necessary to monitor the residues of contaminants in food and feed products.
Testing for contaminants requires the cooperation between the Client and the laboratory. Such collaboration helps to identify the threats, set the goals of a certain analysis and assert the appropriate research method.
Food should, in general, be safe for consumers. It is extremely important to control its security.
The regulations of the Republic of Serbia and the European Union define the maximum permitted levels of contaminants in the food industry, which can be checked in the SP Laboratory as well as the laboratories of J.S. Hamilton, Poland:
- mycotoxins
- metals
- 3-monochloropropane-1,2-diol (3-MCPD-1,2-diol)
- dioxins and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls
- non-dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls
- Policyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH)
- acrylamide
- melamine and its structural analogues
- plant toxins
- perchlorates
- nitrates
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are polycyclic hydrocarbons are forming during the combustion process (burning of wood, smoking of cigarettes or producing of asphalt). They can appear in food due to heat treatment (frying, smoking and grilling) or due to environmental pollution.
Their presence in food is undesirable because many of them are suspected or are proven genotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic properties.
The regulation defines the maximum permitted levels of PAHs, so it has become a need for manufacturers to monitor their presence in food products.
Residue of veterinary drogs
Antibiotics and chemotherapeutics are substances commonly used for various human and animal diseases. The invention and using of these substances is considered as the greatest medical achievement of the XX century.
However, these substances, if present in muscles, animal offal or products of animal origin (such milk, eggs, honey), may become a potential source of negative impact on consumers’ health. Facing most such cases is caused by a failure to comply with certain grace periods, dosage of veterinary drugs incompatible with indications, against the recommended use or applying them to wrong animal species.
In order to protect the health of consumers, a number of restrictions and regulations have been introduced to clarify the use of antibiotics and chemotherapeutics on food-producing animals.
Monitoring the presence of residues of veterinary drugs is a complex and difficult issue due to the fact that these agents belong to different groups (which is related to differences in the chemical structure of individual compounds) and that metabolism strongly influences the presence of residues in the final product. By examining the residues of veterinary substances, the laboratory applies modern analytical methods, such as a liquid chromatograph with a mass / mass detector (LC / MS / MS).
Dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls
Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), called dioxins – it is a group of more than 200 chemical compounds (congeners) of similar chemical structure, whose molecules differ in position and number of chlorine atoms and exhibit a similar mechanism of toxicity to living organisms.
According to a number of studies, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) also indicate a similar toxic mechanism. 17 dioxin congeners containing 4 to 8 chlorine atoms are especially harmful for human health. Extremely toxic compounds among PCDDs and PCDFs are those, in which the chlorine atoms are at positions 2,3,7 and 8, e.g. 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD).
The legislation of the Republic of Serbia and the European Union defines the maximum permitted residue level for the sum of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls that are similar in effect to dioxins (dl-PCBs) and for the sum of selected congeners of polychlorinated biphenyls different in dioxins (ndl-PCBs).
Individual congeners of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls may exhibit different toxicities for human and animal organisms, so the appropriate conversion factors, known as toxic factors, are used for the expression of results.
The use of toxic equivalency factors (TEF) make it possible to express the sum of the toxicity of congeners and facilitate the risk assessment.
The results of the determinations are therefore expressed in terms of the sum of all dioxins and congeners of dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls as toxic equivalents (TEQ), which are the sum of the multiplication of the content of individual congeners and their toxic equivalency factors. The TEF value indicates how many times the toxicity of a compound for a human being is less than the most toxic congener 2,3,7,8-TCDD with TEF =1.
