Emergency Med

As more foods are imported from overseas, we meet foods containing undesireable health-hazard ingredients with growing frequency.  Melamine is one notable example of a substance harmful not only in its place of manufacture, but also in many other countries as melamine-contaminated milk was exported with a wide distribution.  Raman spectroscopy is an ideal tool to detect contaminated toxic substances in food because it is a method of direct analysis that does not require modification of the sample.  Scattered light can be analyzed to detect the target compound without extraction or chemical agents.

Before our experiment, we were concerned that the identification bands for melamine would overlap with those of milk; we found, to our relief, that the 679 cm-1 main peak did not overlap with the Raman bands of milk.  Thus, we found that it is possible to detect melamine in milk by merely focusing a laser beam on the milk sample.