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Formalin on Fresh Tilapia Via Electronic Nose and Assessment of Toxicity Levels with Reference to Average Adult Filipino Weight

Abstract:

Fish is essentially one of the best sources of protein, economically and nutritional-wise, making it one of the favorites of Filipinos in their everyday meals. However, fishes are also easily perishable, especially when it gets stuck in traffic, further increasing the rate of decomposition of the fish as it is transported from the fish port to the local markets across the nation. There are several methods of preservation like icing, but there are also widespread reports regarding the adulteration of Formalin to the fish not only during transport but also its use in the wet markets nationwide to keep fish and other perishable products fresh. Formalin is used to increase the shelf life of fish to a certain extent, but its use provides a health risk to the consumer because it is a known carcinogenic chemical compound and can be toxic when consumed even on a very small amount approximately 0.00002% of the consumers weight. This paper is a study that used an electronic nose system in the detection of formalin specifically on fish samples. The samples were dipped in a formalin solution in different concentrations and controlled in an iced and non-iced (room temperature) environment. The data gathered from the samples were processed and were analyzed using principal component analysis using singular value decomposition in MATLAB. The total variance produced in the PCA plot is 95.15% using 3 principal components. Overall, the total accuracy of the system in correctly detecting formalin on Tilapia is 85.71%. Toxicity assessment of the theoretical formalin content of tilapia also shows that the tilapia adulterated with formalin at small portions, exceeded the toxicity threshold value for average adult Filipinos.