Awhile ago I answered an old thread as I was plowing through the whole site and mentioned something that might be of interest to everybody here. In one of my past lives I worked for a company called Neogen in Michigan as their Latin American Sales Manager. At the time, twenty years ago, they were focused on quick tests for contamination of food and water by various microorganisms and mycotoxins. During my time with them, I learned some things that the general public probably is not aware of.
When I was there, they had hired a man who was responsible for a government program called HAACP which stands for ‘Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points’. He told me that even though salmonella is in some eggs and you can’t tell whether they’re in there or not without breaking open the egg and examining it, the salmonella will only be in the membrane between the shell and the middle of the egg and won’t reproduce there. If the egg is not broken and if the egg is cooked soon after opening, there is little danger of salmonella infection no matter how old the egg is.
Another thing I learned was that most peanuts have aflatoxin in them. This is because the peanut grows inside a shell where the environment is perfect for aflatoxin to grow in plus being grown in locations where the climate is also perfect for that. Peanut growers do not want this to be widely known because of what it can do to their business, but facts are facts.
Also, a lot of coffee beans contain okratoxin and it doesn’t come out by heating it because mycotoxins are not organisms you can kill.
Also, if a horse eats feed contaminated with a mycotoxin called fumonisin, which can occur in corn, it will get leukoencephalomalacia which riddles its brain with swiss-cheese-like holes and it will go bonkers and die. Pigs get pulmonary edema from it.
By now they may have developed means of ridding food and feed and grain of mycotoxins but when I was with this company they would test batches of product with our kits to see if any mycotoxins were present and if they were measured at a certain level they’d destroy the batch. This wasn’t very pleasant financially for food, feed and grain producers, but facts are facts.
Just FYI stuff.
