Shawdesh Desk:

The government has failed to take any effective measure yet to check the adulteration of spices with heavy metals like lead and textile colorants.

All that the government has done since widespread selling of adulterated spices both in loose and packaged forms was reported by independent and public tests over the past five months was limited to small-scale awareness campaigns.

The Bangladesh Food Safety Authority published newspaper advertisements asking people not to buy artificially-coloured turmeric powder and distributed leaflets among spice merchants in wholesale markets such as the one in Dhaka’s Shyambazar.

‘We gave people a chance to rectify themselves if they were involved in any ill practice,’ BFSA chairman Syeda Sarwar Jahan told New Age.

‘We will conduct mobile courts from Sunday,’ she added.

It was learned from one of the independent studies published in September that spice merchants had been mixing lead chromate with turmeric powder and fingers to brighten its colour for at least three decades.

In late September the BFSA chairman had announced that they would conduct mobile courts to check the adulteration but failed to live up to her announcement apparently due to lack of technical support required for determining adulterants in spices.

Presence of lead can be determined in the field using a hand-held device which is only available in a small number with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.

Presence of lead and textile colours could also be detected through tests at laboratories but the BFSA does not have the manpower and technical capacity to continuously monitor the vast spice markets.

The BFSA has rather instructed the deputy commissioners of the country’s nine districts known for large-scale turmeric production to remain vigilant against adulteration of the spice.

But the district administrations are not technically equipped to act by the instruction.

‘There is no point in conducting mobile courts as we can’t instantly identify impurities in the samples,’ said Rajshahi deputy commissioner Hamidul Haque.

Khagrachhari deputy commissioner Pratap Chandra Biswash said that they would soon sit to discuss ways to deal with the adulteration problem.

These two districts are among the nine major turmeric-producing districts whose powder samples of the spice tested positive for excessive lead residues in the ICDDR,B tests.

The ICDDR,B said that consuming lead-laced turmeric powders raised the blood lead level among children and pregnant women in some parts of Bangladesh.

The international research organisation worked jointly with Stanford University, USA for more than five years investigating abnormal levels of lead in pregnant women’s blood.

Mahbubur Rahman, a co-author of the study, told New Age that the most alarming health impact of lead is obstruction of cognitive development among children.

Lead exposure could also have psychological impacts among adults and cause cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases affecting different organs of the body, said Mahbub, who also leads the ICDDR,B  Environmental Interventions Unit.

In May, the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution found lead chromate in packaged turmeric and chilli powders produced under popular Fresh and Dolfin brands.

In June, a team of Dhaka University teachers said that they found textile colour Metanil Yellow applied in some of the turmeric powder samples of several prominent brands.

The BSTI imposed a ban on the production of spices by the companies whose samples failed the test but only for a few days and later lifted the ban.

Experts say, beside intentional application, contaminated soil and adulterated fertilisers and pesticides could be a source of lead in spices.

BSTI deputy director Reazul Haque said that they did not find excessive lead in any of some 40 samples of various spices they tested over the past four months.

‘It does not matter much if lead presence exceeds the permissible limit by a small margin,’ said Reazul.

But lead is considered a highly toxic metal around the globe and many developed countries do not allow any amount of it in food.

Health experts say that any amount of the substance is harmful for health for it gets accumulated in liver, kidney and other organs and affect their functions.

Hannan, a grocer at Uttar Badda, like many others in the country does not have any awareness about spice adulteration and government campaigners never went to him.

‘Even if the government came to ask me to stop selling artificially-coloured spices how can I be expected to know which one is harmful?’ asked Hannan.

‘The government must take all the responsibilities. It looks like that we are eating poisons in good faith,’ he said.