Hungary on Wednesday ordered food retailers to withdraw all products containing paprika, the fiery red spice that is an essential ingredient in the Hungarian national dish, goulash.

Health Minister Jeno Racz said government checks found paprika stored in public warehouses contained high levels of aflatoxin - a toxic material that could potentially damage the human liver and the immune system and may cause cancer.

“This toxin can only be found in paprika coming from the tropics, which indicates that domestic producers illegally mixed imported and domestic products, and misled customers,” Racz told a news conference after a weekly government meeting.

Checks showed concentrations of aflatoxin 10-15 times higher than permitted in some samples, Racz said.

He said it was unlikely that any of the tainted paprika had made it to retailers’ shelves, but he asked consumers not to use paprika until the ministry collected more information.

The ban, effective as of Thursday, will make life hard for restaurants whose menus feature typical national dishes such as goulash, fish soup and various stews and sausages.

Paprika is a key ingredient in most Hungarian meat dishes.

“The menu will probably change,” said the manager of a popular downtown Budapest restaurant.

“We are no magicians - the food in which we needed paprika, for example stew-type dishes, must be taken off the menu.

“We usually have paprika stocks for one week, and probably other restaurants also work in a similar way,” he added.

IMPORTS FROM LATIN AMERICA

The health ministry said on its website [url=http://www.eszcsm.hu]http://www.eszcsm.hu[/url] that banned products included powdered red paprika as well as instant soups and goulash cream sold in tubes.

The ministry said Hungarian producers bought paprika from abroad due to last year’s small crop, and mixed it with their own product.

Racz said the imported paprika came from Latin America.

But he said aflatoxin would have harmful effects only if somebody ate half a kilo of red paprika in a week.

That roughly equals annual per capita consumption.