13 giugno 2007
Histamine emergency in Malaysia
Last week (23th week) the European Community Alert System has reported, in few days, severe contamination of fish products by histamine; the contaminated fish came from Malaysia.
Histamine has been detected in dried anchovies, in salted dried queen fish and salted dried mackerel, dried mackerel and dried anchovies gutted. All the notifications have been made by UK.
Histamine is a biogenic amine involved in local immune responses which regulate physiological functions in the gut; acts as a neurotransmitter. New evidence also indicates that histamine plays a role in chemotaxis of white blood cells. Histamine it’s produced by some microorganisms in fish muscles post-mortem. Histamine level is an indicator of the decomposition process.
Histamine poisoning is well know since years as “scombroid fish poisoning”, because is typical of this kind of fish; symptoms area nausea, vomit, diarrhea, cutaneous rush and swelling. In deeply sensitive persons, could lead to a lethal anaphylactic shock.
The problem of CO (carbon monoxide) is strictly linked to the histamine one.
CO is used as an additive in the fresh fish to keep the bright red color and as a light bacteriostatic. As it is, the compound is not toxic to human beings, but it’s used to make the fish look like fresh even if it’s not. So it could hide high levels of histamine and this is very dangerous for the consumer.
Inside the EU area, the use of CO as preservative is forbidden and histamine levels are regulated by Reg. 2073/2005/EC.
Tecna offer an ELISA kit to measure histamine (product code CI004) and the results are comparable to those obtained by HPLC, which is the instrumental method. Thanks to its advantages the kit is the right tool to perform a good screening between positive and negative samples.
Attached the technical data sheet.
CI004_eng (129 kB)