**1. Introduction**

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Mycotoxins are secondary metabolites produced by several fungal species, toxic to humans, animals and plants. Their ingestion, inhalation or dermal absorption may cause different diseases and even death. These compounds have been described for many decades, howev‐ er in the beginning of the 1960s, they have been chemically characterized due to the discov‐ ery of aflatoxins [1]. The word aflatoxin is the combination of 3 other words "a" for *Aspergillus* genus, "fla" for the species *flavus* and toxin, meaning poison [2].

Aflatoxin is the mycotoxin generating the greatest losses and the highest management costs due to its extremely high toxicity on a unit basis, and its long history of stringent regulation. The costs are inversely related to the regulatory level that must be met, and lower concentra‐ tion allowances will increase the costs of crop management. Several effective ways for the man‐ agement of mycotoxin contamination in agriculture have been stressed. One strategy to manage mycotoxin contamination and decrease health risks and economic costs is to instruct food producers and handlers on how to minimize mycotoxin contamination, and to encourage the adoption of process-based guidelines such as Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) before harvest and good manufacturing practices (GMPs) after harvest. These actions would mini‐ mize risk throughout the production, handling, and processing chain, and can complement product standards [3]. To control the presence of aflatoxins in foods, many countries establish‐ ed maximum tolerated concentrations through legislation (Van Egmond, 1989a cited [4]).

This chapter focuses on properties of aflatoxins and their occurrence in feeds and animal products as meat, eggs, liver, kidneys and milk. Topics regarding mycotoxins absorbents and legislation in feed ingredients and feeds are also covered.

© 2013 Feddern et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Feddern et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
