Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) today announced that oranges and orange juice sold in Australia will not be permitted to contain any carbendazim, after it was announced that existing permissions would be revoked in the first quarter of 2012. The moves follows concerns raised after the US Food and Drug Administration detected trace amounts of carbendazim in orange juice imported from Brazil. Carbendazim is a fungicide used in many countries to control fungal diseases. The Australian... ...Read more »

Australian juice companies are continuing to use oranges from Brazil that may contain residues of the potentially harmful fungicide carbendazim, despite the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) temporarily banning Brazilian orange imports due to health concerns. Carbendazim is used to control plant diseases in cereals and fruit, including citrus, bananas, strawberries, pineapples. Studies have found that high doses of carbendazim cause infertility and destroy the testicles of laboratory animals.... ...Read more »

The Australian Government’s Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has defended itself following media reports on a US ban on certain uses of a class of antibiotic in livestock. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an order on 4 January 2012 prohibiting certain uses of the cephalosporin class of antimicrobial drugs in cattle, swine, chickens and turkeys effective 5 April 2012. Antibiotic use in animals is a potential problem for human medicine because antibiotic resistance... ...Read more »

The Australian State and Territory food ministers, under the umbrella of the Federal Government’s Forum on Food Regulation, propose to investigate a suitable front-of-pack nutrition labelling model as an alternative to the Traffic Light system or Dietary Intake system. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is contemplating a new points-based labeling system for U.S. food and drink products. On Friday, Australian and New Zealand Ministers agreed to the need for an “interpretive”... ...Read more »

American beverage company, ArKay Beverages, has launched what it claims is the world’s first alcohol-free whiskey. Launching the new drink, a spokesperson for the Florida-based company said ‘ArKay’ was designed for “anyone with medical conditions or with religious beliefs to drink whiskey without guilt”. The company claims the drink tastes and looks exactly like traditional whisky. According to ArKay Beverages, the whisky drink is the result of five years of beverage industry research,... ...Read more »

The US Food and Drug Administration has proposed standard definitions for manufacturers who want to label their products as being gluten-free. The FDA said yesterday (2 August) that it is proposing that foods bearing the claim cannot contain “20 parts per million or more” gluten. The agency said the limit was based on the available methods for gluten detection, as current methods cannot reliably detect the amount of gluten in a food when the level was less than 20ppm. The threshold is... ...Read more »

The Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a US-based nonprofit consumer group, has urged the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revise its current serve-size mandatory regulations.  The FDA’s serving size regulations were based on data collected in the 1970s, and the FDA is currently reviewing serving sizes in a broader revision of food labels. In a recent letter to the FDA, the CSPI claimed that US food manufacturers are understating the calories, sodium and saturated fat content... ...Read more »

The US has joined a growing list of countries who have imposed restrictions on the import of Japanese food over fears of nuclear contamination. The Food and Drink Administration (FDA) has restricted the import of dairy, vegetable and fruit products into the US from the four northern prefectures of Japan affected by radiation leaks from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Imports from the Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma prefectures “will be detained upon entry into the United States”... ...Read more »

A report by independent research body the Institute of Medicine and the National Research council has slammed the US Food and Drug Administration’s current operational state, and called on the government to increase funding for a revamp. According to the report, which was requested by Congress, the FDA should be working to prevent outbreaks of food-borne illness, instead of addressing them after they have begun, and should be making better use of data – both collection and sharing. “The... ...Read more »

The US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health have launched a new Safety Reporting Portal, designed to allow concerned citizens to submit a safety report regarding food, drugs and veterinary products that may be a danger. Mandatory safety reporting by private manufactured and processors will also use the new portal, replacing other previous systems such as the Reportable Food Register. The system will also do away with the need to submit duplicate reports on products and... ...Read more »