The evolutionary dynamics in the research on aflatoxins during the 2001-2010 decade.

THEUMER, MG; RUBINSTEIN HR

Aflatoxins

Intech open access publisher.

Lugar: Rijeka; Año: 2011; p. 305 - 322

The interest on aflatoxins began in the late fifties and the early sixties, after more than 100 000 young turkeys? deaths were registered in the course of a few months in 1960 on poultry farms in England. Since the deaths were caused by an apparently new disease, it was termed "Turkey X disease". Shortly after, it was observed that the disease also affected ducklings and young pheasants with high rates of mortalities. The disease was initially suspected to be induced by toxins of fungal origin, and later was proved to be caused by aflatoxins, fungal secondary metabolites synthesized by toxigenic stocks of Aspergillus spp. This discovery has led to a growing awareness of the potential hazards of these substances as potential inducers of illnesses and even death in humans and other mammals. Thus, the ?Turkey X disease? outbreak is widely considered as the initial step in the era of the aflatoxins research.Aspergillus is an extremely common contaminant in stored products in tropical and subtropical regions; mainly grains, nuts and spices, and several species are frequently involved in its decomposition. These molds, and consequently the food contamination with mycotoxins that they synthesize, are ubiquitous in warm regions. Despite this, because the cold-climate countries import grain of geographical areas with tropical and subtropical climates, aflatoxins have gained importance worldwide. Moreover, nowadays the technological processes of food production fail to completely eliminate aflatoxins and therefore are part of food for humans and farm animals, thus favoring the diet-mediated intake of aflatoxins. The scientific literature on aflatoxins includes more than 8000 research articles, and the toxicological data regarding these compounds led to the International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify 1993 the naturally occurring aflatoxins as Group 1 (carcinogenic to humans), and the aflatoxin M1 (AFM1, an oxidative metabolic product of AFB1) as Group 2B (possibly carcinogenic to humans). In this chapter it is attempted to describe somehow the information generated in the aflatoxins field in the past decade on the basis of an exhaustive categorization of the publications retrieved by entering the keyword ?aflatoxin? in the PubMed search engine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) of the United States National Library of Medicine web page, a database of biomedical literature widely used around the world. The initial searching criteria included all the articles published (print or electronic) between 2001/01/01 and 2010/12/31.