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Sub-acute feeding study of saxitoxin to mice confirms the effectiveness of current regulatory limits for paralytic shellfish toxins

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posted on 2023-05-03, 17:44 authored by Sarah FinchSarah Finch, Nicola Webb, Michael Boundy, Tim Harwood, John Munday, Jan SprosenJan Sprosen, Vanessa Cave, Ric BroadhurstRic Broadhurst, Jeane Nicolas
Regulatory limits for shellfish toxins are required to protect human health. Often these limits are set using only acute toxicity data, which is significant, as in some communities, shellfish makes up a large proportion of their daily diet and can be contaminated with paralytic shellfish toxins (PSTs) for several months. In the current study, feeding protocols were developed to mimic human feeding behaviour and diets containing three dose rates of saxitoxin dihydrochloride (STX.2HCl) were fed to mice for 21 days. This yielded STX.2HCl dose rates of up to 730 µg/kg bw/day with no effects on food consumption, growth, blood pressure, heart rate, motor coordination, grip strength, blood chemistry, haematology, organ weights or tissue histology. Using the 100-fold safety factor to extrapolate from animals to humans yields a dose rate of 7.3 µg/kg bw/day, which is well above the current acute reference dose (ARfD) of 0.5 µg STX.2HCl eq/kg bw proposed by the European Food Safety Authority. Furthermore, to reach the dose rate of 7.3 µg/kg bw, a 60 or 70 kg human would have to consume 540 or 630 g of shellfish contaminated with PSTs at the current regulatory limit (800 µg/kg shellfish flesh), respectively. The current regulatory limit for PSTs therefore seems appropriate.

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Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Publisher

MDPI

Journal title

Toxins

ISSN

2072-6651

Citation

Finch, S. C., Webb, N. G., Boundy, M. J., Harwood, D. T., Munday, J. S., Sprosen, J. M., … Nicolas, J. (2021). Sub-acute feeding study of saxitoxin to mice confirms the effectiveness of current regulatory limits for paralytic shellfish toxins. Toxins, 13(9), 627. doi:10.3390/toxins13090627

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