04 March 2005 Blog Home : March 2005 : Permalink
[t]he rats who showed signs of developing tumours were given a daily dose of Sudan I of around 30 milligrams/kg of bodyweight for two years.
Animals given a lower dose - 15milligrams/kg of bodyweight - showed no signs of cancer-related changes.
Scaling this up to humans and we have a dose (for the average 60+kg human) of around 2 grams of dye per day for years causing a trouble. Given that this is a dye in what is, in any case, a colouring/flavouring added to foods in small amounts (micrograms), we can see that as the BBC expert explained:While not an exact comparison, he likened it to the cancer risk associated with smoking just one cigarette in a lifetime.
Even if a person was to eat a contaminated product every day for several years, the risk of cancer, although higher, was still likely to be very low.
Or to put it another way the number of deaths we can expect from exposure to Sudan-1 is approximately 0, but just to err on the side of caution lets say that the deathrate is 1 per 100,000. The estimated death toll in Darfur is 70,000 minimum. If Darfur were to be as harmless as Sudan 1 its population would have to be 70,000*100,000 = 7 Billion or rather more than the entire human population of this planet.