Reviewer: B. Zane Horowitz, MD (Oregon Health and Science University)
Description: An international ecotourist complains of jaw pain and the feeling his teeth are falling out after an Indo-Pacific charter cruise. An anxious mother, an "educated consumer," calls the health department after reading an Internet Web page on phthalates in baby food. Scores of people fall sick after eating watermelons over the Fourth of July weekend, or mussels in Nova Scotia. Is it bacterial? Chemical? Bioterrorism? These real life questions and others are ones that public health departments, poison centers, toxicologists, and food science experts may be called upon to answer. An updated source to have in these cases is this book. This second edition, updated from 66 chapters in 1994 to 86 chapters in 2001, is divided into four volumes. The first three volumes cover bacterial, viral, parasitic, fungal, and plant contamination of food. The fourth covers seafood and environmental toxins.
Purpose: The editors' goal in updating this book is to create a "composite of current information and policies that enable proper risk assessment decisions regarding potential food toxicants."
Audience: Although aimed chiefly at food scientists, there are many others who tackle these questions including environmental toxicologists, public health agencies, food safety advocacy groups, and medical personnel. It is the editor's expressed hope that the science summarized here finds its way into the politicized national and international decision-makers' consciences, where it ultimately will have to vie with economic and political factors in creating a public health policy on food safety.
Features: The book is divided into two main sections. The first section devoted to seafood toxins has a fair bit of redundancy with some of its chapters recapitulating the complete breadth of seafood borne diseases. Individual chapters on ciguatera and tetrodotoxin, by well recognized experts in their fields, are comprehensive and should be the model for future updates of this volume of the series. Unfortunately the chapter on medical management of seafood poisoning is sparse, containing little detail regarding medical decision making. No guidance is given as to when to institute specific measures in the spectrum of presentations these toxicants may cause. The latter section, somewhat a misnomer in its title of environmental toxins, speaks to a wide variety of iatrogenic problems in food science. Thus it compiles in one place good discussions on such disparate topics as drug residues in food, food irradiation and background radioactivity, nutritional toxins, food additives, and foreign bodies discovered in packaged foods. While few of these issues are truly environmentally caused, they are nonetheless emerging issues for consideration in policy development. The chapters on nutritional toxicology, food additives, and drug residues stand out as comprehensive discussions.
Assessment: Although most major toxicology books condense seafood poisoning into a single chapter, none give any information of substance on the topics contained in the latter half of this text. Those researchers, practitioners, and public health departments looking for an expanded scientific discussion of any of these topics should strongly consider adding this book to their libraries.
