Increased Health Impact of Aflatoxins Due to Climate Change: Prospective Risk Management Strategies

Naturally occurring mycotoxins are an important challenge since they are present in many kinds of foodstuffs. Various types of agricultural products,especially ones with rich carbohydrates, are vulnerable to fungi growth and their important secondary metabolites known as mycotoxin (Iqbal et al., 2016). Mycotoxin formation is directly dependent on climatic conditions, i.e. temperature, humidity, and precipitation are key factors for development of toxigenic mould. They may contaminate food prior the harvest, or during the post harvest storage, and also marketing. Aflatoxins (AFs) as the most toxic mycotoxins are secondary metabolites of the fungi belonging to Aspergillus species, mainly A. flavus and A. parasiticus. AFs are reported in several agricultural crops, mainly maize, soybean, peanuts, pistachio, wheat, cottonseeds, etc. worldwide (Battilani et al., 2016). A. flavus as thermotolerant fungi adapts easilyto warmer climate, and may therefore become moreproblematic than the other mycotoxin-producing moulds (Herrera et al., 2016). Currently around 20 different typesof AFs are known, and the major ones are AFB1, AFB2, AFG1, AFG2, and AFM1 (Iqbal et al., 2016).