Abstract
The present study was conducted to evaluate the level of contamination of certain foodstuffs in UAE. The prime objective being to present documented data to the local authorities to help in drafting some regulatory measures to reduce the incidence of aflatoxicosis. In the present study a contribution has been made in the area of suitable media for growth and toxin production. Anwar medium (ANM) is a newly developed medium by author. It is simple, easy to prepare and the basal substrate, which is rice is available in this region. The medium has the ability to give a higher recovery for A. flavus, A. parasiticus and other moulds at 37°C than AFPA. The 37°C incubation temperature which has been used throughout this study is the optimum temperature employed by all laboratories in this region. The survey which has been conducted on contamination of food-stuffs in UAE market has revealed that rice, the staple food, was found to have an average aflatoxin contamination of 0.9 - 3.06 ng/g. Some indigenous foods such as Kisra and Anjeira had aflatoxin levels ranging from 7.85 - 8.28 ng/g. These two products are used by a large community in UAE and by more than 70 million people worldwide. The three types of milk, human, cow and camel have shown interesting results. The pasteurised fresh milk collected from the local market had aflatoxin levels ranging from 24 pg/ml to 79 pg/ml. This could be attributed to the quality of the imported feeds. The local authorities have not yet passed any regulation governing the level of aflatoxin contamination. Camel milk, which is very popular in this part of the world, has been observed to contain aflatoxin. Camels which depend on natural out door grazing have shown the lowest levels of aflatoxin contamination compared with those which were kept indoors and fed on processed fodder. The highest level of aflatoxin contamination recorded in camel' s milk was 60 pg/ml, this level is relatively lower than that of cow's milk. This could be due to the antimicrobial and long preserving properties of the milk. Human breast milk, collected from donors of different nationalities has also been studied. It could be concluded from the present data that the level of contamination with aflatoxin has a direct relationship with the type of diet and food habits. Diets having high quantities of rice, Kisra & nuts are quite likely to have high levels of aflatoxin. The data presented in this study about human breast milk is expected to draw the awareness of the local authorities, nutritionists, food control institutions to the implication of this problem and the necessity for regulatory measures as step to reduce the incidence of aflatoxicosis in our community. Three different methods for the assay of aflatoxin in foodstuffs were employed. TLC as a standard manual procedure, Velasco as a semi-manual method and HPLC as a fully automated technique have been used in parallel throughout this study. The sensitivity of HPLC is about 0.01 while the sensitivity of other two methods is 0.1 and 1 ng/ml respectively. The extraction method used with HPLC has shown the aflatoxin recovery (i.e. %) whereas those used with Velasco and TLC have shown % - level of recovery of aflatoxin. It is clear that the three methods of extraction resulted in 45% - 54% loss in the total amount of aflatoxin. These finding might draw the attention of chemists might suggest some modification to reduce losses occurring during extraction.