Be careful! A poison that can kill you with just 1 mg may be in your kitchen!

Fermented foods are loved by people for their unique flavor. With the arrival of summer, the gradually rising temperature also brings convenience to the production of fermented foods.

However, there are risks behind this kind of delicacy that cannot be ignored.

In late March, a food poisoning incident occurred in Xinyi District, Taipei City, Taiwan Province, my country. As of the end of March, 2 people had died, 5 people were in critical condition, and 18 people were suffering from mild symptoms.

The culprit of this food poisoning incident is a name that is both unfamiliar and lingering: aflatoxin.

So how exactly does this poison contaminate food, and how can we prevent it?

Part 1

Deadly bacteria "invades" China

Aflatoxin is produced by a bacterium called Pseudomonas cerebrovenenans , but this bacterium does not "kill" people from the beginning. Its toxicity has been developed over more than a hundred years.

This bacterium was first discovered in Indonesia, where there is a traditional food called "tempeh", which is made from fermented coconut.

Tempeh made from fermented coconut (Source: buyandship)

Since 1895, several cases of poisoning from eating tempeh have occurred in Indonesia. Similar incidents have occurred every year since then. Although people already know that the tempeh they prepare may be poisonous, they still continue to eat it with a fluke mentality.

The situation continued to deteriorate. By 1975, the number of deaths from poisoning due to eating tempeh in Indonesia reached more than 3,000; and a mass poisoning incident in 1988 claimed the lives of more than 300 people at once.

Since then, the Indonesian government has enacted legislation to ban the production and sale of tempeh, and the number of cases of aflatoxin poisoning caused by Pseudomonas cereus has gradually decreased.

This type of bacteria has also been found in my country, but before 2010, the bacteria detected in my country did not have the ability to produce aflatoxin.

After 2010, incidents of aflatoxin poisoning began to spread gradually across my country.

In July 2018, a family in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, ate black fungus that had been soaked for too long, resulting in three people being poisoned and one person dying. In August 2020, 11 customers in Jieyang City, Guangdong Province, ate rice noodles and suffered from food poisoning symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea. Eventually, one person died and two people were admitted to the intensive care unit. On October 5, 2020, a group food poisoning incident occurred in Jixi City, Heilongjiang Province. During a family dinner, they ate sour soup (a local fermented food) that had been stored for too long, resulting in the unfortunate death of nine people. This was also a tragedy caused by food contamination by fumonisin .

Sour soup (Source: Heilongjiang Provincial Health Commission)

It seems that foreign bacteria invaded my country, leading to the fumonisin poisoning incident caused by Pseudomonas cerebroventris in my country. So, how toxic is fumonisin? Is there a treatment method?

Part.2 The fumonisin that cuts off people’s food supply

Fumonisic acid is a highly unsaturated organic carboxylic acid that is extremely toxic. It mainly affects important organs such as the liver, brain, and kidneys, causing symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, urinary retention, abdominal pain, and excessive sweating.

Only 1 mg of this poison is fatal, and there is no antidote to detoxify it. Clinically, only supportive therapy and symptomatic treatment can be adopted, which cannot completely relieve the symptoms. Therefore, the mortality rate after poisoning is extremely high, reaching more than 40%.

The incubation period after poisoning is also very short. The disease may occur after half an hour to half a day. When the disease occurs, the disease progresses rapidly. Within one to two days, the toxin will reach various organs in the body and cause irreversible damage.

Aflatoxin has no taste other than sourness, but fermented foods themselves are sour, so it is difficult to identify it by smell.

What’s even more terrible is that generally speaking, cooking food can kill many harmful substances, but fumonisin is extremely heat-resistant and pressure-resistant, and its toxicity cannot be eliminated even through high-temperature and high-pressure cooking.

So, how does this substance poison the human body?

Human cells are "high-speed machines" and each cell needs energy supply. The cell components that supply energy to cells are called mitochondria.

In the mitochondria, glucose is eventually completely oxidized and broken down into carbon dioxide and water, and the energy stored in it is converted into an active energy called ATP for use by the cell.

The energy in glucose is like "gold ingots". Although they are valuable, they cannot be used to buy things on the street. Therefore, the function of mitochondria is to exchange "gold ingots" into "loose silver" called ATP, which is more convenient to use.

The reason why fumonisin is so toxic is that it can enter the mitochondria, combine with the enzyme responsible for synthesizing ATP and "strangle" it, making it impossible for the cells to synthesize ATP and thus lose their energy source.

The army was cut off from food and grass, and the morale of the army was in chaos, so the cells died quickly. It was no big deal if some ordinary cells died, but once the heart cells and brain cells that needed the most energy died, the human body would basically die.

Part.3 How to prevent fumonisin poisoning

As mentioned earlier, fumonisin is produced by Pseudomonas cocovenenans, and this fungus prefers a special living environment: it likes the fermentation products of nutritious ingredients such as grains, coconuts or edible fungi.

Experiments show that the probability of the appearance of Pseudomonas cocovenenans is greatly increased in foods with a salt content of less than 2%, grains fermented at room temperature for 1-2 days, and high water content.

In my country, although there are not many types of fermented rice and flour products for consumption (mainly sour soup dumplings), some common rice and flour products with high water content, such as glutinous rice dumplings and wet rice noodles, will become breeding grounds for bacterial activity once left for too long.

Therefore, Exporer reminds all readers that summer is coming, and it is not a bad thing to be cautious about what you eat.

Try not to make fermented rice and flour products at home, and be alert to the risk of spoilage caused by long-term storage of food. When soaking rice noodles, black fungus, vermicelli, mushrooms and other foods, try to avoid soaking them for too long to prevent bacterial contamination. For high-water-content flour products such as cold noodles and gluten, try to eat them within a short time.

Food safety is no small matter. While advocating thrift and frugality, we should also pay more attention to food quality. I hope that readers can establish a correct concept of food safety, eat healthily, and live a happy life.

Source: Science Institute