INFERTILITY. Cancer. Low IQ. You name it, dioxins have been blamed for it. But there鈥檚 no quick way to find out if food is contaminated with these devastatingly toxic chemicals. That could soon change, however, if the first mass-screening test for dioxins in food works as planned.
Demand for a fast, cheap screening test has soared since 1999, when the Belgian dioxin scandal broke. Eggs, meat and dairy products from more than 400 farms were found to be contaminated with dioxins. The source was animal feed that had accidentally been mixed with dioxin-laden transformer oils. Only when chicks began dying did this come to light. It was not apparent earlier because there鈥檚 no quick test for dioxin contamination. Today鈥檚 tests rely on high-resolution mass spectrometers and analyses can take up to a month. The new test takes just a week.
A dozen labs across Europe are about to begin evaluating the test, which was developed by BioDetection Systems of Amsterdam. The test is based on the way cancerous liver cells from rats respond to dioxins. The cells have also been given a gene from fireflies, which produces a glowing enzyme called luciferase whenever the cells encounter dioxin molecules. The gene gets switched on by neighbouring genes when dioxins are present, and the brightness reflects the dioxin toxicity of a sample, says Justin Mason of BDS.
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