 Aflatoxins are a type of toxin. They're produced by fungus or moles and these moles are found in farmer's fields where they grow naturally but of course not all fungus produce these toxins but in tropical countries the fungus which produce toxins are quite common especially in certain types of crops. The mold grows well under tropical conditions and also it tends to infest the crops when they're damaged by drought or by insects so they're particularly a problem where crops are prone to experiencing drought and insect damage. For the crops that get contaminated especially maize it's a large part of people's diets and so what you find is if there's contaminated maize children and adults are getting a large dose. Children are obviously smaller and more susceptible to dying. So this toxin has a range of effects and these are only imperfectly understood. We're quite sure that very high doses of these toxins are lethal. They can kill animals and people and there have been several major outbreaks in Kenya. In fact Kenya is one of the world's hotspots for this problem. But another problem is chronic consumption of lower levels of toxins and that is strongly associated with liver cancer especially if there is hepatitis and again many tropical countries have large problems of hepatitis and then the third area over which there's a little bit more uncertainty but there's a strong association between the presence of these toxins people consuming these toxins and stunting and immunosuppression in children. I think that it's been for some time but more in temperate climates than in tropical climates. We've known about the problem in tropical countries for several decades but because markets are informal and there's not a lot of trade it hasn't been a high priority. For a couple of reasons. I think one is because people are looking for it and finding it a lot and therefore it is affecting trade and the second thing is there has been a few spectacular cases where very high levels of aflatoxins have led to deaths of large number of children particularly in Kenya. So there's a lot of interest in testing to open up export markets to open up commercial markets. There's a lot of interest in governments and a lot of this stems from the fact that now we're trying to purchase more and more food locally for food aid and for other things and this maze or these ground nuts get tested and then we're finding high levels of aflatoxins in the maze that we're buying and so it can't be distributed. There's a growing appreciation that this is an important problem and there's been a lot of investment in different control methods. I think the weakness at the moment is understanding how we can establish on a broader scale diagnostic tests how we can get them implemented and what we can do about the burden and the poor. We're quite concerned that if we get better at diagnosing maize that we'll get a maize channel which is very clean and a maize channel which is very dirty. Better off consumers will be smart enough to know where to get sourced their products to get clean maize and then the other maize will go into food channels for poor people and they'll get higher doses of aflatoxin than they get now. I think we have a wide range of solutions and indeed many of the the centers the CG centers have been working on solutions for a number of years and have come up with a very attractive portfolio of ways to manage aflatoxins but the big challenge now is to scale those out especially into the fields of the poorest farmers who are not so likely to get their their crops tested and who sometimes are because of their poverty find it difficult to invest in these methods which are quite good at helping control the toxin. One of the exciting things is to a transfer of a technology that's been used in America for around 20 years or so which is bio control which is which is taking the fungi that don't produce the toxins and seeding them into fields so they can compete with the toxin producing fungi and that has some potential to go to scale. I think the other is just working in the whole supply chain system and trying to figure out where we can diagnose where the values added what the market is willing to pay and then if we can understand better this stunting problem that's been described we will be able to to know whether we would also want to you invest kind of public health money to reduce the problem using different control methods. So we wanted to look at the range of aflatoxins from how to control them how to test for them but also what were the effects on markets what were the effects on health and how how could we solve the problem and so that's the focus of the range of briefs we invited a number of global experts to comment on these briefs so that we're able to assemble for policy makers and for other decision makers the current state of knowledge of what we need to do about aflatoxins in tropical countries