Food Allergen Management in Australia.

Food allergies are increasing globally, including numbers of allergens, the sensitization rate, and the prevalence rate. To protect food-allergic individuals in the community, food allergies need to be appropriately managed. This paper describes current Australian food allergen management practices.

Arsenic in rice and diets of children.

Levels of arsenic in Australian and imported rice (n = 36) were evaluated using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for total arsenic and a hyphenated high-performance liquid chromatography ICP-MS system for arsenic species. The study also assessed the daily intake of total As from diets of healthy children (n = 15), collected over three consecutive days. A wide variation of total As levels (range: <0.

An examination of consumer exposure to caffeine from retail coffee outlets.

Objective: To analyse the distribution of caffeine doses obtainable from espresso coffee sold by a sample of commercial coffee vendors located on the Gold Coast, Qld, Australia.

Design: A cross section of "Espresso/short black" coffee samples were purchased and analysed for their caffeine content using micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MEKC). Coffees were collected using systematic cluster sampling across five major retail centres.