European developments following incidents with dioxins and PCBs in the food and feed chain

Risk for animal and human health related to the presence of dioxins and dioxin‐like PCBs in feed and food

“…Chlorophenols used to treat cow hides caused one of the first incidents in the food chain because of the use of fat scraped from the hides for production of chicken feed (Higginbotham et al., ). Chlorophenols were also involved in the 2010 incident in Germany with industrial grade fatty acids that were used for feed production (Hoogenboom et al., ).…”

Carry-over of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in dairy cows fed smoke contaminated maize silage or sugar beet pulp

“…Various incidents with dioxins (PCDD/Fs) and PCBs have resulted in a strategy in the EU aiming at decreasing the levels in food and as a result the exposure of consumers to below the current Tolerable Weekly Intake (TWI) of 14 pg TEQ per kg body weight per week (EC, 2001;Malisch and Kotz, 2014;Hoogenboom et al, 2015). The strategy includes the setting of maximum levels for both food and feed, based on the principle ''strict but feasible'', meaning that products with higher levels should be detected and withdrawn from the food chain.…”

Novel approaches to improving the chemical safety of the meat chain towards toxicants

“…In these cases, confirmatory methods such as gas chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (GC-HRMS) or gas chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/ MS) are used because they allow a sample to be declared noncompliant with a low chance (less than 5%) of a false-noncompliant result (Hoogenboom, Traag, Fernandes, & Rose, 2015). Also, their cost, which earlier would have placed them at a disadvantage compared with "screening" methods, has greatly fallen in recent years, as lately reported by Focant (2014) in the case of dioxin monitoring in food of animal origin (Fig.…”