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Food fraud: insights from investigating a near-fatal poisoning with global implications

Cao, Z.; Yemets, M.; Muneem, S.; Shannon, K.; Gowher, F.; Malloy, J.; Kafka, E.; Mitchell, C.; King, J.; Urban, S.

2023-09-29 public and global health
10.1101/2023.09.27.23296221 medRxiv
Show abstract

Risks of food fraud have been exacerbated by ongoing supply-chain shortages and reduced regulatory oversight caused by the COVID19 pandemic. Since food fraud cases involve adulterants that are deliberately disguised, resulting poisonings are especially difficult to investigate and treat. We encountered a near-fatal poisoning with "weight-loss candlenuts" that are readily available online. We leveraged state-of-the-art high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and discovered that commonly used spectral libraries and toxin/poison standards panels do not contain the materials needed to identify the causative agents of this nearly lethal poisoning. By building new methods, we ultimately found Nuez de la India contain high levels of uncommon cardiac glycosides, while deploying HRMS as a novel chemical fingerprinting tool revealed them to be mislabeled yellow oleander seeds. Our work presents a rapid investigative strategy to empower future investigations, and provides guiding principles to food safety programs for treating, and indeed preventing, these potentially fatal poisonings that are increasing worldwide.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.