(Press-News.org) As the United Kingdom forms a new crime unit designed to fight food fraud — in response to an uproar last year over horse meat being passed off as beef — scientists from Germany are reporting a technique for detecting meat adulteration. They describe their approach, which represents a vast improvement over current methods, in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Hans-Ulrich Humpf and colleagues note that food fraud is a major global economic problem. But they also say that adding, for example, horse or pork to other meats without disclosure also can cause consumers to violate their ethical standards and religious practices. The severity of the issue came to light last year in Europe when many ground beef products were found to contain horse meat. And some "beef" samples were as much as 100 percent equine. Food industry experts have attributed the wide-scale problem to organized crime.
To help root out such fraudulent practices, food scientists and regulators have a couple of methods at their disposal. But these techniques occasionally yield false results, cannot detect more than one kind of adulterant or are ineffective at testing processed food, such as sausages. To address these problems, Humpf, along with Christoph von Bargen and Jens Brockmeyer, took another approach, building on the recent introduction of mass spectrometry for meat authentication.
The researchers designed a rapid and simple method for extracting and analyzing proteins from processed food to detect whether horse or pork meat is present. When they tested their approach, they found it was sensitive enough to reliably detect as little as 0.24 percent horse or pork meat even in highly processed beef samples.
INFORMATION:
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Rooting out horse-meat fraud in the wake of a recent food scandal
2014-09-17
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
California's King Fire east of Sacramento
2014-09-17
California's King Fire tripled in size from Monday, September 15 to Tuesday morning, September 16, and current weather conditions are doing nothing more than helping it along. The hot, drought conditions and winds have produced over 12 major fires that still burn all over California. The King Fire is just one of them. It is located east of Sacramento in the Pollock Pines community. Residents have been given mandatory evacuation orders and over 1,600 homes are currently threatened by this fire. It began Saturday September 13 and has spread rapidly through the area fueling ...
Elsevier journal Maturitas publishes position statement on breast cancer screening
2014-09-17
Amsterdam, September 17, 2014 – Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the publication of a position statement by the European Menopause and Andropause Society (EMAS) in the journal Maturitas on the topic of breast cancer screening.
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in women, with slightly more than ten percent developing the disease in Western countries. Mammography screening is a well-established method to detect breast cancer. However there are concerns about over diagnosis ...
Toward making lithium-sulfur batteries a commercial reality for a bigger energy punch
2014-09-17
A fevered search for the next great high-energy, rechargeable battery technology is on. Scientists are now reporting they have overcome key obstacles toward making lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries, which have the potential to leave today's lithium-ion technology in the dust. Their study appears in the ACS journal Nano Letters.
Xingcheng Xiao, Weidong Zhou, Mei Cai and their colleagues point out that the capabilities of lithium-ion batteries, which power many of our consumer electronics, as well as electric vehicles, have largely plateaued. Scientists have been pursuing ...
Environmentalists and industry duke it out over plastic bags
2014-09-17
Campaigns against disposable plastic shopping bags and their environmental impact recently scored a major win. In August, California lawmakers passed the first statewide ban on the bags, and Governor Jerry Brown is expected to sign it. But the plastic bag industry is not yielding without a fight, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.
Alexander Tullo, a senior correspondent with C&EN, reports that the anti-bag campaign logged its first small victory in 1990 when Nantucket became the first place ...
Mechanism behind age-dependent diabetes discovered
2014-09-17
Ageing of insulin-secreting cells is coupled to a progressive decline in signal transduction and insulin release, according to a recent study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The finding, which is published in the journal Diabetes, provides a new molecular mechanism underlying age-related impairment of insulin-producing cells and diabetes.
Ageing is among the largest known risk factors for many diseases, and type 2 diabetes is no exception. People older than 65 years have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes if their insulin-producing cells ...
Study finds Great Barrier Reef is an effective wave absorber
2014-09-17
New research has found that the Great Barrier Reef, as a whole, is a remarkably effective wave absorber, despite large gaps between the reefs. This means that landward of the reefs, waves are mostly related to local winds rather than offshore wave conditions.
As waves break and reduce in height over reefs, this drives currents that are very important for the transport of nutrients and larvae. This reduction in wave height also has implications for shoreline stability.
The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest coral reef system in the world, extending 2,300 ...
New MRI technique helps clinicians better predict outcomes following mild traumatic brain injury
2014-09-17
New Rochelle, NY, September 17, 2014—Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), a specialized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that detects microstructural changes in brain tissue, can help physicians better predict the likelihood for poor clinical outcomes following mild traumatic brain injury compared to conventional imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT), according to a new study published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Neurotrauma website until October ...
NASA sees Tropical Storm Kalmaegi weakening over Vietnam
2014-09-17
Tropical Storm Kalmaegi made landfall on September 17 near the border of Vietnam and China and moved inland. Soon after the landfall as a typhoon, NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the weaker tropical storm.
The MODIS instrument that flies aboard Aqua took a visible picture of Tropical Storm Kalmaegi on Sept. 17 at 03:35 UTC (Sept. 16 at 11:35 p.m. EDT). The image showed the center of the storm in northeastern Vietnam, just south of the China border. Kalmaegi's clouds extended north into southern China and west into Laos.
The Vietnamese ...
Size at birth affects risk of adolescent mental health disorders
2014-09-17
New research from the Copenhagen Centre for Social Evolution and Yale University offers compelling support for the general evolutionary theory that birth weight and -length can partially predict the likelihood of being diagnosed with mental health disorders such as autism and schizophrenia later in life. The study analyzed medical records of 1.75 million Danish births, and subsequent hospital diagnoses for up to 30 years, and adjusted for almost all other known risk factors. The study is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B.
The number of ...
Artificial 'beaks' that collect water from fog: A drought solution?
2014-09-17
From the most parched areas of Saudi Arabia to water-scarce areas of the western U.S., the idea of harvesting fog for water is catching on. Now, a novel approach to this process could help meet affected communities' needs for the life-essential resource. Scientists describe their new, highly efficient fog collector, inspired by a shorebird's beak, in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Cheng Luo and his doctoral student, Xin Heng, explain that deserts and semi-arid areas cover about half of the Earth's land masses. In some of these places, trucks bring in ...