Analyzing European Union Rapid Alert System (RASFF) Notifications of Emerging Marine and Freshwater Toxins from the Last Decade: Appearance Trends and Links with Occurrence Data and Risk Assessment Advancements

Abstract

The EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) is a tool for the rapid exchange of information on food and feed safety issues between EU member states and the European Commission, destined to notify food safety authorities about products posing a risk to human health. Emerging marine and freshwater toxins and their impact on human health and aquatic ecosystems have become a growing concern in the recent years. This is also reflected in the RASFF notifications shared by European countries during the last decade, with the occasional appearance of relevant records. In this work, RASFF notifications related to emerging marine and freshwater toxins from 2012 to date were retrospectively analyzed to discover the patterns of their appearance, as well as to explore their relationship with concurrent occurrence data and/or risk assessment advancements in the field. A total of fifteen notifications involving emerging marine and freshwater toxins were found, which included: ten on ciguatoxins in fish, three on tetrodotoxins in bivalve molluscs, one on microcystins in algae powder, and one on pinnatoxins in bivalve molluscs. This study contributes to a better understanding of the reasons behind the RASFF’s provision of notifications on emerging toxins in EU countries.

Keywords

• RASFF notifications
• emerging toxins
• marine toxins
• freshwater toxins
• risk assessment
• ciguatoxins