Codex Contaminants MCP server

codex-contaminants

Codex Alimentarius CXS 193-1995 maximum levels for contaminants and toxins in food — lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, methylmercury, tin, aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, patulin, melamine, hydrocyanic acid — by commodity.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

59 maximum levels, 2015 edition. Both of those numbers are limitations, and both are stated on every response rather than left in this file.

Read this before using a value

Edition. Codex publishes CXS 193 only as a document, and the current text is behind an authenticated FAO workspace. This pack carries the newest public official edition, 2015 (Amended in 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). The standard has been amended in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, and at CAC47 (Nov

cinnamon (2.5 mg/kg) and dried culinary herbs (2.0 mg/kg) among them.

1. and CAC48 (Nov 2025). Those amendments added maximum levels — lead in

Coverage. 59 entries from the Schedule I tables. Rows whose commodity name wraps across table lines were dropped rather than risk labelling a legal limit with a sentence fragment like "exception of berries".

Together: a miss is not a finding that no limit exists. The not-found path says so in words, because "no maximum level" reads as permission.

Every value carries the source PDF page, so any figure can be checked in one step against .

Tools

contaminant, optionally narrowed to a food.

• contaminantsmaxlevels({contaminant, commodity?}) — Codex MLs for a

applies to one food.

• contaminantsforcommodity({commodity}) — every contaminant limit that

Extraction, and what went wrong four times

extract.py is the extractor. It is column-band driven for a reason: each of these was a real, silent failure during the build, and the tests pin all of them.

page and 29 on the next, so fixed slicing attaches a real limit to a truncated commodity name.

1. Character offsets do not work. The ML column sits at character 36 on one

number), 25 (the withdrawn PTWI in µg/kg body weight) and 3 (3 mmHg of blood pressure) as maximum levels. Fixed by taking the ML column's x-band from each page's table header and accepting only numbers inside it.

1. Reading any number on the page swept in, under LEAD, 73 (a JECFA meeting

unit is read from the header too. Hardcoding mg/kg made aflatoxin M1 in milk read 0.5 mg/kg instead of 0.5 µg/kg: wrong by 1000×.

1. Units differ per contaminant — aflatoxins are µg/kg, metals mg/kg. The

says DEOXYNIVALENOL (DON), and a 3-letter heading TIN is easy to filter out by accident — when it was, tin's canned-meat limits (50 mg/kg) were filed under methylmercury.

1. Section headings must come from the document, not memory. The standard

To refresh: point extract.py at a newer PDF, re-run, and read the output before shipping it. The tables are small enough that a human check pass is feasible, and for legal limits it is not optional.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-contaminants": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/codex-contaminants/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/codex-contaminants/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.