Orange Juice Recall, Will Your Breakfast Kill You?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ceased the shipments of imported orange juice from across the world and will test each one for fungicide.
The announcement arrived on Tuesday after an unnamed juice company noticed low levels of the fungicide, carbenazim, in products from Brazil last month and brought it to the FDA's attention.
The government administration said it will examine all container shipments of orange juice that arrives in the U.S. As multiple samples from each shipment will be collected for testing, results could take between five to ten business days.
"We've got 30 more samples pending, and those come from Canada," said FDA spokeswoman Siobhan DeLancey, according to Fox News.
"I'm not sure what is where in the pipeline," added the spokeswoman.
The FDA is testing shipments for negative "detectable levels" of carbendazim, which will be allowed to enter the country.
Carbendazim plays an important role in plant disease control, but studies have found that high doses of the fungicide cause infertility and destroy the testicles of laboratory animals, according to the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Shipments that test positive for the fungicide will be "turned away or destroyed," the FDA said.
Carbendazim is legal in Brazil, but in the U.S. it is considered an "unlawful pesticide chemical residue."
The trade organization, Juice Products Association, said that "orange juice that shows a level of carbendazim equal or higher than 10 parts per billion, a baseline FDA level of quantification, will be denied entry to the U.S."
Juice Products Association owns Tropicana, and represents company giants such as Coca-Cola, Minute Maid, and PepsiCo; all of which use a mix of juices sourced from Brazil to the U.S.
According to the FDA, the levels of carbendazim which sparked the testing were "very low," and the organization insists that "consumers can be confident that the orange juice in their refrigerators is safe."
The FDA also said that higher levels of the fungicide could be caused by its increased use in Brazil to combat blossom blight and black spot, a type of mold that grows on orange trees.
According to Reuters, a batch of orange juice from Canada will be released shortly on Thursday, the first shipment to enter the U.S. since authorities began testing earlier this month.
