With collaborators in Finland, Austria and the United Kingdom I have been working on an update of the decades-old Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate that, globally 25% of agricultural commodities are contaminated with mycotoxins.
The origin of this number is very much unknown — the original report seems to have gone missing; yet the number remains widely cited in the scientific community, in articles, at conferences and in the general news media.
We took a good hard look at recent studies and results, mainly from the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), publicly available data from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and proprietary data from the feed additive company Biomin, looking at different threshold values to establish a data-based current estimated.
Results are quite surprising and soon to be published in Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. Publication details and citation to follow once it becomes available.
