Purdue launches institute to help farmers commercialize new value-added products

USDA-funded effort targets economic development in rural communities

Grant and Award Announcement

Purdue University

 

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Dharmendra Mishra, associate professor of food science at Purdue University. Mishra also directs Purdue’s new Institute for Food Product Innovation and Commercialization.

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Credit: Purdue Agricultural Communications / Joshua Clark

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A newly formed institute at Purdue University is offering training and development support to agriculture producers with novel food and beverage product ideas. The new Institute for Food Product Innovation and Commercialization is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development.

“This grant is focused on farmers who want to add value to their product,” said Dharmendra Mishra, institute director and associate professor of food science. Entrepreneurs face many steps and challenges in converting commodity crops into new products for retail sales. “We want to remove those hurdles for farmer-entrepreneurs,” he said. 

A joint effort of Purdue’s departments of Food Science and Agricultural Economics, the institute is part of the USDA Agriculture Innovation Center Program. 

“It’s bringing together the technical expertise on food manufacturing and food safety from food science, and the marketing, entrepreneurship and business management strengths of ag econ,” said Kenneth Foster, the institute’s assistant director and professor of agricultural economics.

Dairy farmers might want to produce ice cream or high-protein beverages. Growers of tomatoes and jalapenos might want to market a salsa. Or a beekeeper who sells honey may wish to develop a syrup as well. 

Whatever the value-added product, the new institute can help train rural entrepreneurs in developing a recipe, making their product, educating them about the safety factors they need to control, and assessing their potential market.

“There’s only so much agricultural commodity you can produce,” said Foster, who runs a beekeeping and honey business as his grandfather and father did before him. And that commodity likewise has value limits.

“We put it on a truck, barge, train or plane and we ship it somewhere else and people add value to it,” Foster said. “What can we do to support value-adding at the local level so more of that stays in the local community where the product is produced?"

A key element of the new program is the Food Entrepreneurship and Manufacturing Institute (FEMI) established in 2021 while Foster served as interim head of the food science department. Like the new institute, FEMI is a collaboration of Purdue’s food science and agricultural economics departments.

When Purdue established FEMI, “the idea was to drive economic growth in Indiana and help entrepreneurs struggling with commercializing their food products,” Foster said. Another idea was to reduce the region’s dependence on the national and global supply chain that caused so many problems during the COVID pandemic.

Purdue’s recent history in product development includes introducing Boiler Chips ice cream and Boilermaker Hot Sauce Black and Gold Editions. The students and faculty members involved in these projects benefited from access to the food science department’s Skidmore Food Product Development Laboratory, as will the farmers who participate in the new USDA program at Purdue.

Also providing resources to the new institute is the food science department’s Pilot Plant. After entrepreneurs develop their recipe, they need a pilot test before they begin full-scale commercial production.

“That’s where our Pilot Plant is important,” Mishra said. “We can create or simulate a commercial process in our Pilot Plant to know how this is going to behave in a larger-scale manufacturing environment.”

Agricultural economists at the Purdue Institute for Family Business and the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability will lend further expertise to the endeavor. They will help develop marketing and business plans, along with insights about consumer demand for food and related products.

The program has three phases. Phase 1 consists of six online training courses that introduce participants to the basics of food product design, food safety and business planning. Once participants pass the online training, they can proceed to Phase 2 for a one-day on-campus workshop on the food product life cycle. In Phase 3, program participants receive intensive on-campus, personalized feedback and assessments of their ideas.

Serving on the institute’s board of directors are representatives from Indiana Farm Bureau, Indiana Grown, Indiana State Department of Agriculture, Indiana Dairy Producers, Indiana Vegetable Growers Association, Indiana Nut and Fruit Growers Association, Indiana Corn Marketing Council, and Indiana Soybean Alliance.

In addition to benefiting the economic well-being of the region, “we also want to create impact for the farmer participants and our students as well as the broader program of FEMI,” Mishra said. “At any given time, we have many undergraduate students and graduate students working on real-life projects.”

Dharmenda Mishra, director of Purdue University’s Institute for Food Product Innovation and Commercialization, adjusts equipment in Purdue’s Pilot Plant. The Pilot Plant allows manufacturers to see how a process works before committing to full production.

Credit

Purdue Agricultural Communications / Joshua Clark

Cups of Purdue’s ice cream Boiler Chips and One Giant Scoop, developed in 2023 by the Food Entrepreneurship and Manufacturing Institute (FEMI). 

Credit

Purdue Agricultural Communications/Jessica Kerkhoff

Students and staff part of the Food Entrepreneurship and Manufacturing Institute (FEMI) at Purdue University work with Boilermaker Gold hot sauce in preparation for bottling.

Students and staff in the Food Entrepreneurship and Manufacturing Institute (FEMI) at Purdue University prepare to bottle a hot sauce developed as a part of a Food Science semester long class project.

 

Credit

Purdue Agricultural Communications/Tom Campbell

About Purdue Agriculture

Purdue University’s College of Agriculture is one of the world’s leading colleges of agricultural, food, life and natural resource sciences. The college is committed to preparing students to make a difference in whatever careers they pursue; stretching the frontiers of science to discover solutions to some of our most pressing global, regional and local challenges; and, through Purdue Extension and other engagement programs, educating the people of Indiana, the nation and the world to improve their lives and livelihoods. To learn more about Purdue Agriculture, visit this site.

About Purdue University  

Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.

Writer: Steve Koppes

Media contact: Devyn Ashlea Raver, draver@purdue.edu

Sources: Dharmendra Mishra, mishradh@purdue.edu; Ken Foster, kfoster@purdue.edu.

 

 

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Method of Research

News article

 

Emory researchers launch investigation into why air pollution impacts Alzheimer’s disease risk

Emory University

 

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Rollins researchers Anke Huels, PhD and Donghai Liang, PhD are studying why and how specific toxic components in air pollution increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

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Credit: Emory University

Researchers from Emory University recently received two separate grants, totaling $15 million, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lead a first-of-its-kind, multifaceted study into why specific types of air pollution increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. 

Previous studies have linked Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias to air pollution­—specifically exposure to fine particulate matter <2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), a common class of particles and gases—but it is not known how specific concentrations of this mixture of toxins impact the brain.

The researchers from the Rollins School of Public Health and Emory School of Medicine are partnering with investigators from The University of California, Davis; The University of British Columbia; and Georgia Institute of Technology to gain a more nuanced understanding of why and how specific toxic components in air pollution increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

For the first time, the study is measuring the components of PM2.5 particles in the blood and cerebral spinal fluid of a diverse range of study participants from the Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, including both cognitively healthy adults and adults with a previous dementia diagnosis. They will also measure PM2.5 in brain tissue samples from the center’s brain bank.

“Changes in the early biomarkers of cognitive function can be seen more than a decade before someone develops Alzheimer’s disease,” says Anke Huels, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology and principal investigator of the two NIH awards. “By measuring the biological response to air pollution, we have a really unique opportunity to find out what is causing the effects of PM2.5on Alzheimer’s disease risk. This could give us a better understanding of why some people develop Alzheimer’s disease and others do not, but also identify potential intervention and prevention strategies to make a difference on a policy level.”

As part of this effort, the researchers are developing improved air pollution models to measure PM2.5components in the Atlanta area and assign air pollution estimates to the study participants based on their address. They are conducting metabolomics, proteomics, epigenomics, and genomics analyses to better understand the biological response to air pollution.

“We are using cutting-edge methods to unravel the thousands of environmental chemicals that exist in PM2.5 and assess their individual and joint effects on our brain health,” says Donghai Liang, PhD, associate professor of environmental health and principal investigator of the two NIH awards. “And in the future, other scientists will have a much better understanding of the toxic components of PM2.5that are responsible for an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.”

Emory researchers launch inves [VIDEO] | 

Researchers from Emory University recently received two separate grants, totaling $15 million, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lead a first-of-its-kind, multifaceted study into why specific types of air pollution increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Credit

Emory University

Study of paper wasps shows that body size is larger in habitats nearer the equator

An analysis of 429 specimens belonging to 39 species representative of the diversity of Polistes in the Americas confirmed the inverse of Bergmann’s rule by pointing to larger body size for species occurring in or near the tropics.

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

 

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Variation in body size of paper wasps (Polistes) analyzed in the study. Each individual in the image represents a different species 

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Credit: Alexandre Somavilla

A study of the correlation between environmental variables such as latitude and body size in paper wasps (genus Polistes) by a group of Brazilian researchers concludes that the nearer the habitat of a species to the equator, the larger its body size. The genus is widely distributed around the world and serves as a model for sociobiological and ecological studies.

An article on the study is published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The findings refute for these insects a nineteenth-century theory that predicts larger body size at higher latitudes or in colder regions of the planet.

“If you examine wasp collections worldwide, you notice that body size varies considerably from one species to another. We analyzed many specimens from a representative number of species and concluded that latitude is the key determinant of these differences,” said André Rodrigues de Souza, first author of the article and a researcher at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto School of Philosophy, Science and Letters (FFCLRP-USP) with a Young Investigator Grant from FAPESP. 

The researchers found that species living in warmer, less seasonal habitats closer to the equator tend to be larger than species living at higher latitudes, where temperatures are lower. This is the opposite of what is predicted by Bergmann’s rule.

Named for German biologist Carl Bergmann, who proposed it in 1847, the rule states that species with larger body sizes are found at high latitudes or in cold environments. A large body is an advantage for survival in a cold habitat: with less surface area in proportion to volume, they radiate less heat and can maintain a stable body temperature.

The article argues for the converse Bergmann’s rule, a twentieth-century theory proposed by scientists who observed that many ectothermic organisms inhabiting warmer regions tend to have larger body sizes than those in colder habitats. Ectotherms rely primarily on the external environment to regulate body temperature.

“A possible explanation for the converse Bergmann’s rule in this case is that at high latitudes and in more seasonal environments with low temperatures, the foraging period for wasps is very short and they become smaller adults as a result. Individuals that develop faster have an advantage, but at the cost of a smaller body size,” Souza said.

In temperate regions the favorable season for wasps lasts three to four months, while in the tropics it lasts about nine months, allowing more time for their young to forage and grow.

Collections

The researchers analyzed 429 well-preserved adult Polistes wasps belonging to species that occur throughout the Americas from Canada to Argentina. The specimens were sent to Brazil from museum collections in different countries or analyzed at the institutions holding the collections abroad. In all, 37 species were represented by females and 28 also by males; two were represented only by males, giving a total of 39 species investigated. The analysis included the use of statistical tools showing a direct correlation between latitude and body size.

Polistes species inhabiting the Americas were chosen because the phylogeny of this group on the continent is well-resolved: all species descend from the same ancestor, which is not known to be the case in other regions of the planet. Moreover, the diversity of the genus is greatest in the Americas, with around 90 species. The sample was therefore considered sufficient to validate the theory that body size is significantly influenced by environmental conditions.

A previous study by Souza and other collaborators showed that regulation of body temperature in paper wasps is not the main determinant of body size, as predicted by Bergmann’s rule. The authors conclude that darker insects have an advantage in colder environments because they can heat faster than lighter ones.

“Studies like these contribute to a broader picture of the evolution of paper wasps, helping us understand their diversity in tropical regions better and emphasizing the importance of conserving their habitats,” Souza said.

Furthermore, he added, the studies highlight the importance of preserving entomological collections, which provide material for ongoing research on the many species of paper wasps and the relationships among them.

The authors of the latest study also include researchers at the Federal University of the Minas Triangle (UFTM), the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), and the National Institute of Amazon Research (INPA).

About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.

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Journal

Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

DOI

10.1093/biolinnean/blae074 

Article Title

Interspecific variation in paper wasp body size supports the converse Bergmann’s rule

 

NJIT biologist among $10M XPRIZE competition winners for rainforest biodiversity sampling tech

NJIT's Eric Fortune and team “Limelight Rainforest” are grand prize winners of the global XPRIZE Rainforest Competition with their drone-delivered Limelight device, capable of identifying thousands of rainforest species in mere hours.

New Jersey Institute of Technology

 

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Limelight uses telemetry, satellite communications and advanced AI to interpret the hundreds of thousands of images, recordings and samples collected by the platform’s advanced microphones, cameras and capture systems.

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Credit: Limelight Rainforest

NJIT biologist Eric Fortune and a team of scientists called “Limelight Rainforest” have won the five-year XPRIZE Rainforest Competition, securing half of the competition's $10 million prize purse. 

The team's dramatic victory was announced Nov. 15 at the G20 Social Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the culmination of a global competition that began in 2019 when the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation challenged innovators around the world to “develop technology to capture the true biological diversity of rainforests…and show the value of protecting the natural resources within them.”

Ultimately, Limelight Rainforest and its biodiversity sampling technology, “Limelight”, outshined the competition — topping an initial field of 300 teams from 70 countries, including six finalists that competed in Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil this past July.

“It's amazing. Being part of this crazy adventure over three years has been an enormous learning experience with so many twists and turns. It’s something I'll never forget," said Fortune, a team leader who developed sensor and control systems used in the Limelight data collection platform.

"The real reward is that this work can have a lasting impact on these vital ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. It’s what drew us to this competition in the first place.”

Originally started by Colorado Mesa University biology professor Thomas Walla, Limelight Rainforest forged its drone-based sampling technology under the unique rules of the competition's various stages held in rainforests around the world — teams have been challenged to deploy technologies to remotely survey as much biodiversity as possible across 100 hectares of forest accurately, and in under 24 hours.

VIDEO: XPRIZE Rainforest Finals Competition

The Limelight team of more than 50 engineers, biologists and indigenous scientists developed their system to collect a flurry of data on species that included ultrasound produced by bats and traces of DNA left by primates moving through the forest.

The latest Limelight uses telemetry, satellite communications and advanced AI to interpret the hundreds of thousands of images, recordings and samples collected by the platform’s advanced microphones, cameras and capture systems. The 24-hour sampling period was followed by a 48-hour sprint to produce a final report of species, their movements and deep insights into the forest's biodiversity.

Uncovering Life in the Amazon

On the heels of the semifinals hosted in Singapore, the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition finals were fittingly held in the Amazon — the most biodiverse place on Earth, estimated to be home to over 10% of the known species in the world.

“We were taken by boat to this remote location on the shores of the Rio Negro where they had a hut for us to spend the next 24 hours,” Fortune said. “Our team has a lot of experience in the Amazon, so we were confident, but we didn’t expect it to go so smoothly.

“We sent out 10 Limelight rafts with our drones once they put us on the clock, and from there everything just worked.”

Upon deployment, the team's devices — each equipped with five light trap cameras — lured and imaged an astonishing 250,000 insects that were classified in mere hours.

The Limelight’s new water sampling tool, deployed using custom robotic systems, filtered 45 liters of water from remote streams in narrow canopy gaps to catalog the vast biodiversity of the forest’s aquatic ecosystem. It yielded over 27 million environmental DNA (eDNA) sequencing reads on location.

The team also pioneered a new “Nature Node” acoustic system, capable of identifying bird and other tree-dwelling species by their vocalizations with unprecedented precision.

“For 40 years, people have been trying to track animals based solely on their vocalizations. It was a dream of mine as a grad student and our team made it happen,” Fortune noted.

VIDEO: Finals Testing Insect Timelapse

AI Trained by Indigenous Experts

One of Limelight’s biggest standout features in the finals was the accuracy of their AI in identifying the vast array of forest life.

For that, the team turned to the Quechua and Waorani Indigenous groups native to the rainforests of Ecuador, who reviewed and validated thousands upon thousands of sounds and images of rainforest species. Part of this effort was funded by a Kickstarter campaign to train their AI’s species identification capabilities.

“Many of our team members have been conducting research in Ecuador and building relationships with the Quechua and Waorani groups for over 20 years,” said Fortune. "Our Indigenous team members are the true masters of this knowledge. They were vital in helping confirm the identifications of these species … in many ways the team was completely reliant on their expertise.

“We were certain our AI was trained well because we had the world's top experts validating the data that we fed into the AI.”

Upon its XPRIZE success, the team is already planning to scale up Limelight production. Fortune is helping lead development of the first generation of Limelight devices for real-world use, partnering with NGOs, Indigenous communities and other organizations invested in rainforest conservation.

The experience is one he will not soon forget, but Fortune says the team’s work toward rainforest conservation has only just begun.

 “We're already identifying projects in South America and Southeast Asia where we could have an impact, redesigning our systems for these real-world needs,” said Fortune. “Once these devices start to be deployed, we will make enormous discoveries and uncover so many hidden organisms unique to these rainforests. It could change how we value and protect them.”

forest forged its drone-based sampling technology under the unique rules of the competition's various stages held in rainforests around the world — teams have been challenged to deploy technologies to remotely survey as much biodiversity as possible across 100 hectares of forest accurately, and in under 24 hours.

Credit

Limelight Rainforest

Florida Museum curator helps team score 1st-place and $5 million in international biodiversity competition

Florida Museum of Natural History

 

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A team of scientists, robotics engineers and naturalists has won first place and $5 million in an international biodiversity competition.

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Credit: Cat Kutz

Robert Guralnick, curator of bioinformatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is a member of an international team that won first place in the five-year XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The winners were announced Friday, Nov. 15 at a summit held in Rio de Janeiro. More than $7 million was awarded to the top-ranked teams, with $5 million going to the first-place winner.

XPRIZE is a non-profit, solutions-driven organization that has hosted large-scale competitions to solve humanity’s greatest challenges since it was established in 1994. The XPRIZE Rainforest competition kicked off in 2019, hosting 300 teams across 70 countries. The collective goal of each participant was the acceleration of technological innovation to improve the speed and precision of biodiversity surveys in support of global conservation efforts.

In the final stage of the competition, six finalist teams had 24 hours to deploy their technologies, remotely survey a 100-hectare test plot of tropical rainforest without physically entering the test area, and produce a biodiversity analysis report within 48 hours following the deployment. To win the competition’s grand prize, teams were also tasked with demonstrating scalability to effectively disrupt the often lengthy, laborious and resource-intensive process of data collection and analysis.

“It was such a massive collaborative effort,” Guralnick said. “I have never been involved in such a high-pressure situation, where one team does so much work to produce high-quality data, analytics and insights.”

Guralnick is a member of the Limelight Rainforest team, whose solution to the challenge was to create a monitoring device equipped with lights, audio recorders, cameras, insect traps and collection reservoirs. During the competition, each of ten Limelight devices was transported by drone and deposited in the forest canopy. At sundown, the lights were activated, creating clear beacons that attracted insects within the 100-hectare plot.

This strategy got them through the semifinals hosted last year in Singapore. The team made several tweaks and improvements to the collection apparatus ahead of the finals competition that took place in Amazonas, Brazil this April. The alterations enabled them to create an even more detailed snapshot of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystem.

Team members were brought on at various stages of the competition. Florida Museum researchers Raphael LaFrance and Nick Gardner also joined the Rainforest Limelight ranks, as did former University of Florida Ph.D. student Caitlin Campbell. Niyomi House, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum, and Julie Allen, former Florida Museum Ph.D. student and current professor of biology at Virginia Tech, played equally indispensable roles.

During finals, the onboard camera systems photographed and automatically classified 250,000 insects in just 24 hours. Team members also used canopy mapping software to identify thousands of trees and piloted drones to collect water samples from the forest floor. Because organisms are constantly shedding genetic material into their environment, team members running an onsite genetic lab were able to sequence isolated strands of DNA suspended in the water samples and use it to identify many of the organisms that lived nearby.

The team used the Limelights’ audio recorders to automatically identify birds, using a birdsong database created in partnership with Indigenous bird guides in Ecuador.

Though the express goal was to measure as much biodiversity as possible, Guralnick said devices like the Limelight and others developed for the rainforest competition have the potential to go far beyond static inventories.

“One of the questions we want to answer is not so much what’s out there, but what services the forest is providing to animals,” he said. “For example, we can detect buzz feeding of bats in and around the site, which is an indication that it’s a high-quality area.”

By mapping the position of each monitoring device, the team could also triangulate the movement of birds and track bats as they searched for food.

The rainforest competition was developed to address the critical need for rapid biodiversity inventories in areas that remain poorly studied or are threatened by development. Devices like the Limelight will improve the accuracy of environmental assessments, make it easier to identify the ecosystem services provided within a plot of land and monitor ecosystem health in even the most remote areas.

“Our ability to deploy monitoring devices to explore the world is just in its infancy,” Guralnick said. “We’ve never before had the ability to get this type of dense, real-time, on-the-ground information on what’s happening in our ecosystems at this scale. When it comes to automated monitoring, we're learning to walk after crawling for a decade. I wonder what's going to happen when we can run.”

Visit the Limelight Rainforest’s website to learn more about the team and the technologies they’ve developed.

 

Despite federal warnings, kratom still readily available across US

Researchers find kratom available at 72% of tobacco specialty stores across U.S.

University of Mississippi

 

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A recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health shows that tobacco and vape shops across America are still selling kratom -- even in states where the substance is illegal. 

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Credit: Graphic by John McCustion/University of Mississippi Marketing and Communications.

OXFORD, Miss. – Nearly three-fourths of tobacco and vape stores in the United States sell an addictive, dangerous substance with connections to liver toxicity, seizures and death, according to a new study from the University of Mississippi. 

That's a key finding of a recent study on the availability of kratom published in the American Journal of Public Health.  

Kratom is a tree native to Southeast Asia and its leaves have been used as a stimulant and for pain management for hundreds of years. More than 2 million people in the United States use kratom annually. 

The Drug Enforcement Administration briefly classified kratom as a Schedule I drug in 2016, but withdrew that action after public backlash. Several states have taken up the issue in local laws since, but there has been no federal action. 

In Mississippi, more than 30 counties and cities have restricted or banned the product. The state legislature has debated several bills restricting the sale of kratom since 2021 but has yet to pass any legislation on the product.   

“This product, it’s being marketed as being a mood stabilizer and painkiller, but then we also have several warnings from federal agencies and people who have died from overdoses,” said Andrew Yockey, UM assistant professor of public health.  

“That is the disconnect, right? There are people who think this is a fantastic product and mood stabilizer that can help people who are withdrawing from opioids, but it’s also linked to these poisonings and hospitalizations.  

“So why are people using it? Because it’s so widely available. Ease of access is one of the biggest risk factors for substance use besides peer pressure.”  

Matthew Rossheim, associate professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, is leading the team of researchers on the project. He spoke with tellers and attendants at 520 tobacco and vape shops across the nation – 10 from each state and territory. He found that even in states where kratom is banned, many stores still sold it.  

“I spent my nights and weekends for about three, four weeks making these calls and just asking,” Rossheim said. “What we found is that these products are widely available.”  

In states where kratom is legal, more than 80% of tobacco and vape specialty stores reported selling it. In states where it is illegal – Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Vermont, Wisconsin and Rhode Island – most stores reported not selling the substance.  

But in Rhode Island, some 40% of the surveyed establishments reported selling the illegal supplement, the researchers said. 

Concentrated extracts of the plant are marketed as remedies for a range of conditions. 

“Kratom products are marketed or advertised as having various benefits from use, from therapeutic benefits to being stimulants or depressants, to pain relieving, to even being a substitute for opioids,” Rossheim said. “Because of the lack of scientific evidence, those are potentially deceptive claims.”  

Researchers have linked kratom to liver toxicity, seizures, salmonella and other life-threatening conditions. The product is also highly addictive and has withdrawal symptoms. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that at least 91 people died from kratom overdose between 2016 and 2017, the most recent period for which data is available.  

Kratom is not an FDA-approved drug, nor is it recognized as a supplement. That means there is little or no oversight in its production, Yockey said.  

“One of the biggest health things that we're seeing is that these products are hitting the market without supervision,” he said. “And if there’s no supervision, do you really know what you’re putting in your system?” 

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Journal

American Journal of Public Health

DOI

10.2105/AJPH.2024.307824 

Article Title

Kratom Products Are Widely Available Throughout the United States