Review of South Sudans Food Safety Status in Relation to Chemical Contaminants

South Sudan faces a myriad of challenges ranging from a struggling economy, low levels of technology to weak health care systems. It is a new country born out of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Its independence on July 9th, 2011, ended one of the longest protracted civil wars in Africa. The country has a population of about 12 million ethnically diverse people who rely on subsistence farming as the main source of livelihood. The several decades of civil war rendered South Sudan food industry and food safety infrastructure severely underdeveloped and in most cases dysfunctional. Today, some of the major health problems experienced by the people of South Sudan are foodborne illnesses. This situation is worsened by the absence of systems to identify, record and prevent food borne diseases yet some food borne infections are fatal. Deficiency in surveillance and case recoding infrastructure for food-borne diseases of both microbiological and chemical aetiology in the entire Republic of South Sudan means absence of reliable data on food-borne diseases. This affects the level of information available and subsequently hinders the country from appropriately diagnosing and responding to the burden of food bore diseases in terms of treatment as well as putting in place preventive mechanisms. Currently, agrochemical residues, environmental wastes, crosscontamination or food processing toxicants are presumed to be among the major food contaminants in South Sudan. This paper provides a review on chemical food contaminants of public health importance in the Republic of South Sudan.