Assessing Safety of Market-Sold Fresh Fish: Tracking Fish Origins and Toxic Chemical Origins

Abstract

Increasing global and domestic food trade and required logistics create uncertainties in food safety inspection due to uncertainties in food origins and extensive trade activities. Modern blockchain techniques have been developed to inform consumers of food origins but do not provide food safety information in many cases. A novel food safety tracking and modeling framework for quantifying toxic chemical levels in the food and the food origins was developed. By integrating chemicals’ multimedia environment exchange, food web, and source tracking systems, the framework was implemented to identify short-chain chlorinated paraffin (SCCP) contamination of fresh hairtail fish sold by a Walmart supermarket in Xi’an, northwestern China, and sourced in Eastern China Sea coastal waters. The framework was shown to successfully predict SCCP level with a mean of 17.8 ng g–1 in Walmart-sold hairtails, which was comparable to lab-analyzed 21.9 ng g–1 in Walmart-sold hairtails. The framework provides an alternative and cost-effective approach for safe food inspection compared to traditional food safety inspection techniques. These encouraging results suggest that the approach and rationale reported here could add additional information to the food origin tracking system to enhance transparency and consumers’ confidence in the traded food they consumed.

Dietary Intake Contributed the Most to Chlorinated Paraffin Body Burden in a Norwegian Cohort

“…For example, LCCPs have recently been found to be the predominant CP class in the German environment. 57 Such trends may indicate a shift in collateral transport of SCCPs via food trade 58 toward MCCPs and LCCPs, as well as a corresponding increase in human exposure to these CP classes via various exposure pathways such as dust ingestion and dermal exposure. However, data for LCCPs are severely lacking in the global database for all matrices ( Figure 4 ).…”

Tracking and optimizing toxic chemical exposure pathways through food trade: A case study in SCCPs contaminated seafood in China

“…The increasing food demand due to the rapidly growing population and personal income has boosted the expansion of agriculture. However, this has triggered the use of various chemicals ( 4–6 ), such as pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics, and persistent toxicants ( 7 , 8 ) in agricultural activities. These chemicals enter the human food chain through the contaminated soil, water, and air ( 9 , 10 ), posing significant threats to human health.…”

“…Some international agencies such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization have been making collaborative efforts to safeguard public health and ensure adherence to the best practices in food trade ( 12 ). The food safety monitoring and tests in many countries are performed in a limited number of randomly selected samples, owing to the high cost ( 8 ). Many toxicants such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mercury with a high cost of food monitoring have not received sufficient attention.…”

“…The considerable scale and complexity of the food trade and supply system require a high cost for food safety inspection following the traditional method, owing to their reliance on extensive instrumentation and costly laboratory infrastructure ( 12 ). In contrast, numerical simulation offers a rapid, efficient, and alternative approach to assess food safety quantitatively ( 8 , 13 , 18 ). Huang et al ( 13 ) have simulated the impact of the global fish trade on human POPs exposure by integrating a food trade pathway model and atmospheric transport model and reported that the global fish trade increased human exposure and associated risk to PCBs in areas with low ambient emissions of PCBs.…”

Release Mechanism of Short- and Medium-Chain Chlorinated Paraffins from PVC Materials under Thermal Treatment

“…They have been widely used in poly­(vinyl chloride) (PVC) products, rubber, paints, sealants, adhesives, leather, textiles, and metalworking fluids. − Based on the carbon chain length, CPs can be subdivided into short-chain CPs (SCCPs, C 10–13 ), medium-chain CPs (MCCPs, C 14–17 ), and long-chain CPs (LCCPs, C >17 ) . SCCPs and MCCPs both attract worldwide attention in view of their properties of environmental persistence, long-range transport, bioaccumulation, and high toxicity. ,− Therefore, the Stockholm Convention has listed SCCPs (Cl content: >30%) and MCCPs (especially, C 14 and Cl content: >45%) as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in Annexes A and D, respectively. , …”