• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.181-188
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• 2014

The objective of this study was to analyze the microbiological hazards of Astragalus membranaceus Bunge on the post-harvest processing. Samples from processing equipments (cleaner, water, cart, table, tray and packaging machine), personal hygiene (hand) and harvested crops (before washing, after washing, after sorting, and after drying) were collected from four farms (A, B, C, and D) located in Chungchengbuk-do, Korea. The samples were analyzed for sanitary indication bacteria and pathogenic bacteria. First, total aerobic bacteria and coliform in processing facilities were detected at the levels of 0.93~4.86 and 0.33~2.28 log CFU/$100cm^2$ and/mL respectively. In particular, microbial contamination in hand (5.43~6.11 and 2.52~4.12 log CFU/Hand) showed higher than processing equipments. Among the pathogenic bacteria, Bacillus cereus was detected at the levels of 0.33~2.41 log CFU/$100cm^2$, 1.48~3.27 log CFU/Hand and 0.67~3.65 log CFU/g in equipments, hands, and plants and Staphylococcus aureus were detected in cleaner, table, hand and harvested crops (before washing and after sorting) by qualitative test. Escherichia coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes, and Salmonella spp. were not detected. These results indicated that personal hygiene and processing equipments should be managed to reduce the microbial contamination of A. membranaceus Bunge. Therefore, management system such as good agricultural practices (GAP) criteria is needed for hygienic agricultural products.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.21-26
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• 2001

Risk assessment traditionally are conducted on individual chemicals; however, humans are exposed to multiple chemicals in daily life. The organophosphorus (OP) pesticides are considered in a single risk assessment because they act by a common mechanism of toxicity, and there is likely to be expose to multiple OP pesticides simultaneously or sequentially. The OP pesticides act by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterasc (AChE) and have available extensive database. AChE is widely distributed throughout the body, most importantly in the nervous system. Inhibition of AChE results in accumulation of acetylcholine in the nervous system that results in clinical signs of cholinergic toxicity, including increased salivation and lacrimation, nausea and vomiting, muscle fasciculation, lethargy and fatigue, among others. To conduct an exposure assessment for pesticides in the diet, we need to know the food consumption patterns of the populations, and the pesticide residue levels in the foods that are consumed. This study was conducted to identify cumulative dietary risk due to multiple OP pesticides that can be exposed through various foods. Total 22 food samples including cereals, vegetables and fruits were collected randomly two times from food markets in several sites (4 cities). The subjected foods were selected by regarding of highly consumed foods to general Korean people. The 12 OP pesticides including Acephate, Azinphos-methyl, Chlorpyrifos, and Diazinon were monitored. For the exposure assessment, general adult group of 60 kg body weight was regarded as target population and food consumption data suggested by Lee et al. (2000) were used as consumed value of individual food. Analyses of samples for OP pesticides have been carried out according to the multiclass multiresidue analysis method and acephate and methamidophos analysis method of Korea Food Code. In general the levels of OP pesticides found in the food samples were very low or not detected.

• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2007

As the consumption of environmentally friendly agricultural products increases, food safety is at the forefront of public health concerns. We analyzed the biological hazards of 26 species of leaf vegetables and 4 species of fruit according to types of cultivation (conventional or organic filming) and distribution system (giant retailers or organic food stores) using various culture media, automatic bacterial identification systems, and microscopy, Total bacterial count of unwashed agricultural product ranged from $5.2{\times}10^{3}\;to\;1.5{\times}10^{5}\;CFU/mL$ (from 0.1 g of agricultural products), and the average count dropped 25-fold (range, 8-60-fold) after water washing. Microbial levels of washed organic agricultural products were $6.0{\times}10^{2}-1.9{\times}10^{4}\;CFU/mL$, and were not significantly different f개m the microbial loads on conventionally farmed produce. There was no significant difference in bacterial count from agricultural produce purchased from giant retailers or organic food stores. Total microbial count of Chinese cabbage, welsh onion, red chicory and kale were comparatively high, and Enterobacter cloacae was isolated most frequently. Parasites were detected in agricultural products purchased from conventional farm products in the stores of giant retailers, and in organic food stores, and parasite prevalence was especially high in Chinese cabbages and welsh onion. The study indicated that cultivation methods and distribution systems did not cause significant differences in biological contamination levels of agricultural produce. Some vegetables and fruits were highly contaminated effective sanitizing methods to reduce these biological hazards are needed.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2012

BACKGROUND: Many edible mushrooms are known to accumulate high levels of heavy metals. This research was focused on health risk assessment to investigate the mushrooms in Korea, arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg) contaminations in edible mushrooms in cultivated areas were investigated, and health risk was assessed through dietary intake of mushrooms. METHODS AND RESULTS: The heavy metals in mushrooms were analyzed by ICP/MS after acid digestion. Probabilistic health risk were estimated by Monte-Carlo simulation techniques. The average contents of As, Cd, Pb, and Hg were $0.035{\pm}0.042$ mg/kg, $0.017{\pm}0.020$ mg/kg, $0.043{\pm}0.013$ mg/kg, and $0.004{\pm}0.004$ mg/kg, respectively. The results showed that contents of Cd and Pb did not exceed maximum residual levels established by European Uion regulation (Cd 0.20 mg/kg and Pb 0.30 mg/kg). For health risk assessment, estimated intakes in all age populations did not exceed the provisional tolerable daily intake of As and Hg, provisional tolerable monthly intake of Cd, provisional tolerable weekly intake of Pb. The Hazard Index (HI) were ranged from $0.03{\times}10^{-4}{\sim}0.01{\times}10^{-3}$ for As, $0.02{\times}10^{-3}{\sim}0.81{\times}10^{-3}$ for Cd, $0.06{\times}10^{-3}{\sim}0.38{\times}10^{-3}$ for Pb, and $0.08{\times}10^{-4}{\sim}0.14{\times}10^{-3}$ for Hg at general population. CONCLUSION: The HI from the ratio analysis between daily exposure and safety level values was less than 1.0. This results demonstrated that human exposure to heavy metals through dietary intake of mushrooms might not cause adverse effect.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.77-95
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• 1986

In 1962 the governing bodies of FAO and WHO approved the establishment of a joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme, the creation of a jointly sponsored body to be known as the Codex Alimentarius commission to implement the Programme. It can reasonably be claimed that the Commission has assumad the leading role in establishing internation food standards throughout the world. The Codex Committee of Food Hygiene has received much advice and assistance from other international organization which have been working in this field for a number of years. In particular, it has received valuable background documentation from the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods(ICMSF) which was set up by the International Association of Microbiological Societies(IAMS), and also from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Nevertheless, in spite of the information supplied by governments and research bodies in this field, microbiological standards have proved to be a highly controversial subject from the point of view of Codex standards. When it is decided to establish a microbiological standard for a food or class of foods, the following technical and administrative aspects must be considered: 1) The standard should be based on factual studies and serve one or more of the following objectives: (1) to determine the conditions of hygiene under which the food should be manufactured; (2) to minimize the hazards to public health; (3) to measure the keeping quality and storage potential of the food 2) The standard should be attainable under practicable operating and commercial conditions and should not entail the use of excessive heat treatment or the additions of extra preservatives. 3) The standard should be determined after investigation of the processing operation. 4) The standard should be as simple and inexpensive to administer as possible, the number of tests being kept to a minimum. 5) Details of methods to be used for sampling, examining and reporting should accompany all published microbiological standards. 6) In establishing tolerance levels for the permissible number of defective samples, allowance should be made for sampling and other variations due to differences in the laboratory methods. The following additional points should be kept in mind: 1) It is not satisfactory to establish one set of microbiological standards for a miscellaneous group of foods, such as“frozen foods”or“precooked foods”. 2) Microbiological standards should be applied first to the more hazardous types of food on the basis of experience of expected microbiological levels, taking into account variations in composition, processing procedures, and storage. 3) When a standard is established, there should be a definite relationship between the standard and the hazard against which it is meant to protect the public. 4) The sensitivity, reliability, and reproducibility of the sampling and analytical methods should be compared in different laboratories and the methods to be used should be specified in detail as part of the standard. 5) Tolerances should be included in the standard to account for inaccuracies of sampling and analysis. 6) Standards should be applied on a voluntary basis before compliance is made mandatory.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.121-132
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• 1992

Pesticides are regarded as one of indispensable materials used in agriculture to protect pests and to keep the agricultural productions steadily. However, food contamination arisen from their application has brought about public concerns for safety suspicion to human health. A brief presentation is given in this paper on what has been conducted against pesticide residues to evaluate and ensure the safety of agro-porducts. The commonest countermeasures to keep safety would be tile establishment of MRls and safe-use guidelines of pesticides according to good agricultural practices. Korean MRls have been established on 38 chemicals with 56 commodities and in the case of safe-use guidelines 344 formulation items have been done by the government On the other hand, no satisfactory information is still available to evalute the actual residue levels in domestic agro-products, but a cautious proposal could be suggested through the fragmentary monitoring data of pesticide residues, so that the current residue levels would be far from potent hazard enough to cause chronic impact on human. The most important thing is to have the farmers keep safe use guidelines at pesticide application for the production of safe agricultural commodities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Food Hygiene and Safety Conference
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• 1992.07a
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• pp.21-32
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• 1992

Pesticides are regarded as one of indispensable materials used in agriculture to protect pests and to keep the agriculture productions steadily. However, food contamination arisen from their application has brought about public concerns for safety suspicion to human health. A brief presentation is given in this paper on what has been conducted against pesticide residues to evaluate and ensure the safety of agro-products. The commonest countermeasures to keep safety would be the establishment of MRLs and safe-use guidelines of pesticides according to good agricultural practices. Korean MRLs have bun established on 38 chemicals with 56 commodities and in the case of safe-use guidelines 344 formulation items have been done by the government. On the other hand, no satisfactory information is still available to evalute the actual residue levels in domestic agro-products, but a cautious proposal could be suggested through the fragmentary monitoring data of pesticide residues, so that the current residue levels would be far from potent hazard enough to cause chronic impact on human. The most important thing is to have the farmers keep safe use guidelines at pesticide application for the production of safe agriculture commodities.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.279-288
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• 2011

Objectives: This study investigated the levels and components of floor-settled dust in two elementary schools located at different sites (one near the Shihwa industrial complex and the other in a rural area) in order to evaluate the amounts of trace metal elements (As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn) and microorganisms. Methods: Over twenty settled-dust samples were collected from the two elementary schools. Trace metal elements were extracted from the dust using hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, and the amounts were measured by ICP-OES. Microbiological analysis was performed by bacterial culturing using R2A medium and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE). Results: The results showed that the amounts of three metal elements (Cr, Pb, and Zn) were significantly different between the schools (${\alpha}$=0.05, p<0.04). In addition, microbial communities in each school were highly correlated with one another. Among the identified microorganisms, a number of potentially opportunistic microorganisms, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumannii, were found. Conclusions: This study will provide preliminary data for assessing levels and types of chemical and microbiological agents in elementary schools and for further evaluating human health risks associated with the agents.

• Geotechnical Engineering
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.47-62
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• 1994

It has been well known that the rainfall-triggered rise of groundwater levels is one of the most important factors resulting the instability of the hillside slopes. Thus, the prediction of porewater pressure is an essential step in the evaluation of landslide hazard. This study involves the development and verification of numerical groundwater flow model for the prediction of groundwater flow fluctuations accounting for both of unsatu나toed flow and saturated flow on steep hillside slopes. The first part of this study is to develop a nomerical groundwater flow model. The numerical technique chosen for this study is the finitro element method in combination with the finite difference method. The finite element method is used to transform the space derivatives and the finite difference method is used to discretize the time domain. The second part of this study is to estimate the unknown model parameters used in the proposed numerical model. There were three parameters to be estimated from input -output record $K_e$, $\psi_e$, b. The Maximum -A-Posteriori(MAP) optimization method is utilized for this purpose, . The developed model is applied to a site in Korea where two debris avalanches of large scale and many landslides of small scale were occurred. The results of example analysis show that the numerical groundwater flow model has a capacity of predicting the fluctuation of groundwater levels due to rainfall reasonably well.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.3613-3618
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• 2014

Stathmin, also called oncoprotein 18, is a founding member of the family of microtubule-destabilizing proteins that play a critical role in the regulation of mitosis. At the same time stathmin has been recognized as one of responsible factors in cancer cells. The aim of this study was to assess stathmin status, its correlations with clinicopathological parameters and its role as a progosnostic marker in EC patients. The protein and mRNA levels of stathmin were examined byimmunohistochemistry (IHC) and in situ hybridization in 100EC tissues and adjacent noncancerous tissues. mRNA and protein expression of stathmin in three EC cell lines(EC9706, ECa109, EC1 commonly used in research) were also analyzed using immunocytochemistry, western blot and in situ hybridization. The prognostic value of Stathmin expression within the tumor tissues were assessed by Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier analysis. We showed that stathmin expression was significantly higher in EC tissues than in adjacent noncancerous tissues. High stathmin immunostaining score in the EC was positively correlated with tumor differentiation, Tumor invasion, Lymph node metastases, and TNM stage. In addition, we demonstrated that three EC cell lines examined, were constitutively expressing a high level of stathmin. Of those, EC-1 showed the strongest mRNA and protein expression for the stathmin analyzed. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that significantly longer 5-year survival rate was seen in EC patients with high Stathmin expression, compared to those with low expression of Stathmin expression. Furthermore, multivariate Cox proportional hazard analyses revealed that Stathmin was an independent factors affecting the overall survival probability. In conclusion, our data provide a basis for the concept that stathmin might be associated with EC development and progression. High levels of Stathmin expression in the tumor tissues may be a good prognostic marker for patients with EC.