Hazardous impacts of glyphosate on human and environment health: Occurrence and detection in food

Abstract

With the ever-increasing human population, farming lands are decreasing every year, therefore, for effective crop management; agricultural scientists are continually developing new strategies. However, small plants and herbs always impart a much loss in the yields of the crop and farmers are using tons of herbicides to eradicate that problem. Across the world, several herbicides are available in the market for effective crop management, however, scientists observed various environmental and health effects of the herbicides. Over the past 40 years, the herbicide glyphosate has been used extensively with the assumption of negligible effects on the environment and human health. However, in recent years, concerns have increased globally about the potential direct and indirect effects on human health due to the excessive use of glyphosate. As well, the toxicity on ecosystems and the possible effects on all living creatures have long been at the center of a complex discrepancy about the authorization for its use. The World Health Organization also further classified glyphosate as a carcinogenic toxic component and it was banned in 2017 due to numerous life-threatening side effects on human health. In the present era, the residues of banned glyphosate are more prevalent in agricultural and environmental samples which are directly affecting human health. Various reports revealed the detailed extraction process of glyphosate from different categories of the food matrix. Therefore, in the present review, to reveal the importance of glyphosate monitoring in the food matrix, we discussed the environmental and health effects of glyphosate with acute toxicity levels. Also, the effect of glyphosate on aquatic life is discussed in detail and various detection methods such as fluorescence, chromatography, and colorimetric techniques from different food samples with a limit of detection values are revealed. Overall, this review will give an in-depth insight into the various toxicological aspects and detection of glyphosate from food matrix using various advanced analytical techniques.

Keywords: Detection techniques; Food toxicity; Glyphosate; Herbicide; Human and environment health.