Have Indian spices become “dangerously” contaminated?

There was a time when the Europeans took tremendous risks and navigated across seas and oceans to come to India in search of spices. Why is that now Indian spices are raising eyebrows in the west? In the last decade there have been many reports of rejections by US and European countries of import shipments of spices from India due to adulteration, filth and presence of micro-organisms. Indian government has reacted by setting up audits, inspections of products exported from India to reduce cases of rejections.

Assuming that the efforts of exporters of spices and Indian government has resulted in better quality spices being exported to US and Europe, are we, residents of India, consuming spices of questionable quality? It is more likely that we are consuming spices that would normally be considered dangerous in US or Europe.

In the March 15,^, 2010 issue of TIMES magazine there was an article highlighting the presence of lead in Indian spices. It said that a research team from Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health “visited 15 Indian specialty stores in the Boston area and purchased 71 cultural powders and 86 spices and food products”. They found that “about 25% of the food items, including spices such as cardamom, fenugreek and chili powder, contained more than 1 microgram of lead per gram of product”. The article goes on to say that as per E.U. guidelines the acceptable threshold is 2 to 3 micrograms of lead per gram of the product. Some of the tested products exceeded this limit. The important thing to note is that while individually many of these spices have lead levels below permitted levels, these could add to the potential exposure from other sources. for human beings. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set the maximum exposure limit for children at 6 micrograms per day (mcg/day) for children and 75 mcg/day for adults, the report in Times says that even as little as 5mcg/dl of blood can be dangerous for children.

CDPH (California Department of Public Health) has reported cases of lead poisoning linked to chilli powder and turmeric from India. What are the possible sources of lead contamination? Lead contaminated soil, manufacturing or drying process or knowingly added to increase weight or lend colour.

The import refusal reports on the US FDA’s website provides details on the rejections of products that do not meet the US food administration standards. The refusal reports can be accessed by country or by product for every month. Many of the venerable names in Indian spices industry figure in the rejections list. A quick perusal of the rejection reports indicate that most of the cases of spices from India, were attributed to suspected presence of salmonella or pesticide residues.

The European Union had conducted an audit of Indian spice exporters in Feb 2011. The report is available online. The following table from the report shows the increase in the number of alerts about food imports from India. There was an alert from EU on aflatoxin contamination of Indian spices. The audit was conducted to assess the quality controls for aflatoxin contamination in India.

	Imports to EU			No of Alerts
	2008	2009	2010	2008	2009	2010
Chilli products (curry)	3156 (UK, BE)	3592 (UK, BE)	2711.6 (UK, FR)	2	1	26

The conclusions of the audit report were not surprising – there were either inadequate or no controls for various spices.