1 Coffee Contamination
Coffee rust is not the only fungus that can affect coffee plants. Ochratoxin A is toxic poison produced by Aspergillus and Penicillium fungi that grow on coffee plants. The amount of acceptable ochratoxin is controlled in Europe, with an acceptable level of five parts per billion for ground coffee, and 10 parts per billion for instant, because who cares about instant coffee drinkers anyway? Its presence in coffee was only discovered in 1988, and a study shortly afterward found that 7 percent of shipments were over this safe level.
Work by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN helped farmers to reduce the average level found in exports by over 25 percent between 1998 and 2004.Ochratoxin is not the only poison found in coffee. In 2003, one man was killed and 15 people were hospitalized with suspected food poisoning. Doctors eventually deduced that the cause of the illness wasn’t sandwiches, as initially thought, but someone poisoning the coffee pot with arsenic. Sadly for the town of New Sweden, this seems to be the only event in their history worthy of making their Wikipedia page.
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