Horizon scanning

I have been catching up this morning with all the food recalls around the world and linking to them on this FoodSafetyChat Blog and on Twitter. There seem to be some new emerging issues carrageenan in jelly products,  E.coli O26 and cheese, and some more frequent issues - metal contamination, mislabelling of products with the wrong label, hygiene failures, undeclared allergens and so on.

A quick scan of the RASFF Portal shows the usual range of food safety issues and also gives some "blasts from the past":

• Border rejection of imported shrimps from India because of concerns over nitrofuran, Was the major incident in the UK really sixteen years ago in 2002 .. interestingly this food safety hazard is still a major issue around the world.
• Food alert in the Netherlands for edible clay (zeolite and bentonite powder) for presence of metals - lead (8.56; 32.6 mg/kg - ppm) and mercury (0.188 mg/kg - ppm) and high content of aluminium (41877; 73851 mg/kg - ppm) 
• Horsemeat unfit for human consumption from Poland

and one I would never have predicted ... food poisoning suspected (Brucellosis) caused by frozen camel milk from the Netherlands. Interesting reading..