Abstract
The present review aims at highlighting the current status of food safety in Pakistan, focusing upon foodborne illness, aflatoxins, pesticides residues, heavy metal contamination and food adulteration. A computerised bibliographic search was carried out on PubMed, Medline, Google Scholar and Scopus to retrieve the most relevant abstracts and full-text articles. The results revealed higher morbidity and mortality associated with foodborne illness especially among children and infants. Retrospective studies demonstrated higher levels of aflatoxins, pesticides residues and heavy metals in a wide range of foods leading to increased disease burden especially kidney failure and resurgence of cancer in the country. Practicing adulteration of foods especially milk seems to be rapidly growing thereby posing a public health risk. Poverty remains to be the most instrumental determinant to exacerbate this issue of public health significance. Presently, there exists no precise and integrated system of monitoring and surveillance to mitigate health and economic losses associated with substandard food safety system in Pakistan. The country needs to bring about certain radical legislative changes to ensure that safe food reaches every one without bearing any kind of additional cost.