Mycotoxin contamination in the Arab World: highlighting the main knowledge gaps and the current legislations.

Abstract

Mycotoxins are among the most alarming food and feed contaminants threatening human and animal health. Since the discovery of aflatoxins in the 1960s, the body of knowledge in the field of mycotoxins increased dramatically: biological syntheses have been unraveled; myriad analytical detection methods were developed; surveys in different matrices were conducted; investigations into toxicities took place; several methods for control have been tested; and legislative debates to protect the public from their toxic effects continue. Based on that, hundreds of review articles were published to summarize different areas in the mycotoxin field, including their contamination per country or per region. However, mycotoxin contamination in the Arab world, which includes 22 countries in Africa and Asia, have not been specifically reviewed. To this end, this work has been conducted to review the contamination of mycotoxins in the Arab world to identify the main knowledge gaps needed to enhance the safety of food and feed. Our search, using several keywords, covered all the (non-)indexed publications written in English or Arabic or French. To the best of our knowledge, a total number of 306 papers were published between 1977 and 2021, focusing on the natural occurrence of mycotoxins in different matrices, which fall under one of 14 different categories (animal feed; animal products; baby food; cereals; cereal by-products; dairy products; legumes and pulses; nuts; spices; fruits and vegetables; juices and drinks; biomarkers; oils; and others). The relevant information (e.g., detected mycotoxins; number of samples; concentrations; method of detection) were extracted, processed and visualized using Microsoft Excel, R, GraphPad Prism, and RAWGraphs. The main results are summarized as follows: (i) research on mycotoxins has increased over the years, however the accumulated data on their occurrences are scarce to non-existent in some countries and regions; (ii) state-of-the-art technologies on mycotoxin detection are not well implemented; neither are contemporary multi-mycotoxin detection strategies in the Arab world, showing the need for capacity-building initiatives; (iii) mycotoxin profiles differ among food and feed categories, as well as between human biofluids. Furthermore, the present work highlights the current legislations in the Arab countries and provides future perspectives in order to mitigate mycotoxins, enhance the safety of food and feed and protect the consumers. Among these perspectives, we suggest some research initiatives to boost mycotoxin research among the Arab countries.