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Food Additives
Published in Dongyou Liu, Handbook of Foodborne Diseases, 2018
Bromine, a chemical belonging to the same group as chlorine and iodine, is a food additive found in flour and some fruit-flavored soft drinks. By competing with iodine, bromine disrupts the thyroid gland and interferes with the production of thyroid hormones, leading to hypothyroidism. In addition, potassium bromate is a category 2B carcinogen, which has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. While banned from use as a food additive in Europe and Canada, bromine is still used in baked goods and soft drinks in the United States [34,35].
The non-linear tradition: historical development of complexity
Published in Keiran Sweeney, Complexity in Primary Care, 2017
Self-organising behaviour refers to the tendency within complex systems for patterns of observable, coherent behaviour to emerge from what initially appear to be random interactions. This was first observed by two chemists, Belousov and Zhabotinski, in a very simple chemical reaction (which can be easily reproduced). They prepared a mixture of citric acid, sulphuric acid and potassium bromate, placed it in a shallow dish and stirred it. When this is done, bright blue dots appear and spread, and then red dots appear in the centre of the blue dots, forming expanding blue and red rings. When these rings run into each other, they do not superimpose like waves, but form more intricate red and blue circular patterns. This was the first (and is still the most easily reproducible) example of spontaneous formation of patterns from a sea of chaos (Cohen and Stewart, 1994). One might ask, so what? Self-organising features are emergent properties of complex adaptive systems. They are emergent in the sense that their nature could not have been predicted from a reductionist understanding of the separate constituents of the system. For example, a wave is an emergent property of water. Self-organising behaviour is a fundamental feature of complex adaptive systems. And since complex adaptive systems are pervasive in biological, human and organisational communities, it is important to understand the nature of selforganising behaviour in order to ascertain how those systems work (Cilliers, 1998). Self-organisation operates through positive feedback within a system. In a biological complex system, activity that confers an advantage on the system, or causes it to behave positively, tends to augment the influence of those agents or activities associated with the desired state through positive feedback. Over time, the system will preferentially weight the input of agents whose actions provide positive output, thus establishing repeating patterns of behaviour, which the system expresses as stable characteristics. Computer specialists were able to reproduce self-organising behaviour in their early modelling of binary systems. Binary systems are systems whose elements can switch on and o, depending on the state of adjacent elements within the systems. While the work was taking place with electrically lit binary computing systems modelling neural activity in the brain, researchers noted the emergence,
Oral administration of a potassium bromate dosage: Determination and evaluation of accumulated bromate on the liver of male mice
Published in Drug and Chemical Toxicology, 2022
Mousa Othman Germoush, Ibrahim Hotan Alsohaimi, Ayoub Abdullah Alqadami, Zeid Abdullah Alothman, Hazim Mohammed Ali, Mohammad Saad Algamdi, Abdullah Mohammed Aldawsari
In the present study, potassium Bromate as a bromate precursor was administered orally to mice and its fate in the body was studied. A simple developed method was applied for the spectrophotometric determination of bromate in the mice's liver tissues by the reaction of bromate and pararosaniline (PRA) in acidic medium. The absorbance of the product was read at 540 nm. No bromate was detected in mice’s liver tissues after dosing with lower dose of KBrO3 (G1 0.01 mg·L−1, G2 0.025 mg·L−1 and G3 0.1 mg·L−1) during the study period (1–2 months). While in the higher dosages (G4 1 mg·L−1, G5 10 mg·L−1 and G6 30 mg·L−1) the BrO3− was detected for samples analyzed in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th weeks (W1, W2, W3, W4, and W5). The accumulated BrO3− was gradually increased with the time and reached 0.085, 0.210 and 0.322 mg·L−1 in W5 for G4 1 mg·L−1, G5 10 mg·L−1 and G6 30 mg·L−1 respectively. Summing up the obtained results revealed that the higher dosages of BrO3− were fatal and possible to accumulate in the liver tissues either for mice or human. The obtained recovery values of the spiked samples were satisfactory and generally higher than 95%. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) were found to be less than 2.0%.