Traders in Bangladesh used lead chromate to enhance turmeric’s appearance. Then scientists and policymakers stepped in.

From the article:

[I]n the fall of 2019, [...] researchers from the nonprofit International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, or ICDDR,B, traveled to Ataikula and adjacent districts in the northwest to meet with Sheikh and others in the turmeric business. The researchers warned them that consuming lead chromate could lead to kidney and brain damage or cause developmental delays in children. By that point, the spice had made its way out of the country: The problem had already gone global.

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That outreach was the culmination of years of work conducted by an international group of researchers, including a research scientist at Stanford University. They worked together with the ICDDR,B and Bangladesh’s Food Safety Authority to protect the country’s food supply from further lead exposure. The impacts of this intervention were significant, and summarized in a study published recently in the science journal Environmental Research. When researchers sampled and tested turmeric across the country before and after the intervention, the level of adulteration in this one study dropped from 47 percent to 0 percent.

The use of peuri in turmeric renders the food fraudulent, as it is done purposefully to alter the commodity for economic gain. Instances of food fraud are notoriously difficult to resolve, said Michael Roberts, expert on the regulation of food fraud, and executive director of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Often, the economic incentives just aren’t there for authentically made food. Processors are likely to increase their margins if they cheat.

Fighting food fraud isn’t easy, and experts have a range of ideas on how to do it. Some approaches rely heavily on scientific testing while others work through undercover investigations. Regardless of the method, rooting out food fraud requires constant surveillance across long and complex supply chains. In this sense, Bangladesh’s success is noteworthy, said Roberts, who was not involved in the project to eliminate lead chromate from turmeric. “It’s unusual that this kind of campaign takes place, whether in developed or developing countries,” he said, and there are lessons from this case study that could be applied to other commodities.

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In the northwest districts around Ataikula, farmers often talk about a large flood in 1988 that damaged the crop and darkened the color of the roots. To cope with a bad turmeric growing season, Bangladeshi businesses began importing the spice from India. Meanwhile, to remain competitive, Bangladeshi processors started using peuri to disguise the color of the water-damaged crop. The practice of adulteration became more common after the flood.

Sheikh, the trader from Ataikula, recalls being enthralled by the golden glow of the turmeric that he saw at a market in the early 1990s. When he asked the traders about it, they told him to go to India to learn to add peuri during processing. Sheikh followed their advice. When he returned home and brought his haul to the market, he earned more when selling turmeric polished with peuri. “Sometimes,” he said, “wholesalers were not willing to buy if there was no chemical in it.”

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Lead chromate is comprised of two heavy metals, lead and chromium. The risks of lead consumption are well documented. Continual exposure can cause developmental and neurological issues in children, who absorb four to five times as much lead as adults. In adults, repeated lead exposure is linked to high blood pressure, as well as kidney and reproductive issues. Over time, lead can get integrated into bones because the body mistakes it for calcium, owing to similar chemical properties. There is no known safe level of lead consumption.

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The FDA began sounding the alarm about turmeric around 2011. In April of that year, Archer Farms recalled its turmeric, which was sold nationwide at Target and Top Food stores, for having high levels of lead. In 2013, continued surveillance and testing by food safety inspectors at the New York State Department of Health identified lead in turmeric sold by Pran, a Bangladeshi company. Since then, the FDA has issued more than a dozen alerts for turmeric products from South Asia for high lead content.

These recalls notwithstanding, turmeric purchased in the United States tends to have lower levels of lead, said Paromita Hore, the director of environmental exposure assessment and education in New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She coauthored a study that tested nearly 1,500 samples of spice products. The turmeric purchased abroad — in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Morocco — had the highest lead concentrations, meaning that people all over the world could have been affected. This disparity, the study explained, may have been due to the adulteration of spices in countries with poor regulatory control.

Families in the U.S. were affected, too, through the informal movement of spices that happens when they visit their home countries and bring products back to the U.S. This practice circumvents the regulations in place for commercially imported foods.

Studies conducted in Boston, New York City, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington have all found a connection between consumption of lead-tainted turmeric (mostly procured from markets overseas) and elevated blood-lead levels. Still, it’s challenging to calculate exactly how much lead in spices is problematic for human consumption.

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In 2017, on the heels of this discovery, Forsyth and her Bangladeshi collaborators at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, met with government officials from Bangladesh’s Department of Agricultural Authority to understand how turmeric was produced and distributed. From these conversations, and from conversations with others in the industry, they identified nine regions of Bangladesh, eight of which contribute almost half of the nation’s turmeric for domestic use and export.

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Local and international news outlets disseminated the findings from Forsyth’s new studies to create public awareness. The researchers met with businesses to make them aware of the risks of lead in turmeric. BFSA posted notices in the nation’s largest wholesale spice market, Shyambazar. The flyers warned people of the dangers of lead and that anyone caught selling turmeric adulterated with lead would be subject to legal action.

Authorities also raided Shyambazar using a machine called an X-ray fluorescence analyzer which can quickly detect lead in spices. Nearly 2,000 pounds of turmeric was seized in the raid and two wholesalers were fined 800,000 taka, more than $9,000 USD.

A few months later, the team went back again to collect samples to see how their intervention had fared. Only about 5 percent of 157 samples were found to be adulterated with lead chromate, down from nearly 50 percent before. When the researchers conducted a sampling spree again in 2021, they found that the use of lead chromate had practically disappeared.

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Many of the turmeric wholesalers selling in Shyambazar have been at it for more than 30 years. Law enforcement, they said, had only showed up for the turmeric. No other spices, they noted, have ever come under scrutiny.

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FORSYTH IS HEARTENED by the impact that she and her colleagues have had in Bangladesh, and she wants to replicate these methods — studying the supply chain, understanding the incentives for adulteration, and creating interventions to dissuade the use of lead chromate — in India and Pakistan.

But reproducing this success is already posing challenges. “It’s easy, obviously, to collect data of spices and analyze them and understand the patterns and where the high levels of lead are. That’s been straightforward,” said Forsyth. Identifying government officials who can advocate for and run an intervention has been harder.