Canadians develop test strips to reveal food toxins

[GM599]

Canadians develop test strips to reveal food toxins

Canadian scientists have discovered a quick method to test for toxic pesticides in food which, in the future, could be adapted to detect potentially deadly bacteria such as E. coli, listeria or salmonella.
John Brennan, a researcher at McMaster University inHamilton, Ont., and his team have developed what they call a "dipstick" test to identify small amounts of pesticides that may exist in food and beverages. The study was published in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal American Chemical Society's Analytical Chemistry.
While paper-strip tests likely won't be marketed to individual consumers because pesticides used in Canada are considered safe by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the 10-centimetre-long strips could be used on food from countries which still use pesticides banned in Canada, Mr. Brennan said.
"If you import from places like India and China and there may be residue on the food, you could test for that," he said. The strips, which turn a certain colour depending on the amount of pesticides present, also could be beneficial to the military to test for chemical warfare agents, he added.
The test strips, which produced results in less than five minutes, could prove useful to developing countries or remote areas that may lack access to expensive testing equipment and electricity, he said.
And since the strips don't need professional staff to analyze the samples, Mr. Brennan said they could be put to use in food-manufacturing facilities to curb the spread of outbreaks.
"So another place we might see this is somewhere like Maple Leaf Foods," he said. The company suffered a tainted-meat scare after two contaminated meat slicing machines in its Toronto plant produced meat laced with the bacteria listeria. That outbreak contributed to the deaths of at least 20 people in August 2008.
Currently, scientists can use the strips to detect five or six types of toxins but in the future, Brennan said they will be able to use the same technology to save lives by using the paper-strip tests to catch bacteria before it enters the food chain.
He cited the E. coli contamination of groundwater in Walkerton, Ont., in 2000, as another example of where the strips could have been useful. In that case -- the worst E. coli outbreak in Canadian history -- the bacteria invaded the municipal tap water and led to seven deaths and sickened more than 2,300 with severe gastrointestinal illness.
"Like with what happened with the E. coli poisoning in Walkerton -- it was in the run-off and it ended up in wells," he said. "So people could test their well water with [these strips]."
Brennan said there is also interest from the agricultural community to test for moulds on the grains they feed to livestock.
The scientists say the paper-strip test is more practical than conventional pesticide tests because results can be produced in minutes rather than hours. And says Brennan, conventional tests use expensive and complex equipment.

[ricklbert]

The crappy thing is they don't tell you if the produce is Genetically modified or not. unless it is organic and even then organic is a loose word........ricklbert