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Carcinogens in food: priorities for regulatory action

Department of Health, Skipton House, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6LW, UK

RJ Fielder

Department of Health, Skipton House, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6LW, UK

GE Diggle

Department of Health, Skipton House, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6LW, UK

DR Tennant

Food Safety Directorate, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 17 Smith Square, London SW1P 3JR, UK

CE Fisher

Food Safety Directorate, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 17 Smith Square, London SW1P 3JR, UK

A pragmatic possible approach to the prioritization of chemical carcinogens occurring as food contaminants is described, based on the carcinogenic risk to the popula tion. This should be of value in ensuring that resources for assessment and management of carcinogens in food are directed to the most important areas with regard to carcinogenic risk to the population. Key components of this approach are an assessment of the carcinogenic hazard to humans combined with estimations of intakes per person and of the proportion of the population exposed. These are used to derive an index referred to as the Population Carcinogenic Index. Concerning the hazard assessment expert judgement is used to place the chemical in one of five categories. The highest category is for chemical carcinogens that are believed to act by a genotoxic mechanism. It is recognised that such com pounds may vary enormously with respect to their potency and various approaches to ranking carcinogens on the basis of potency are reviewed. The approach adopted is to subdivide the genotoxic carcinogens category into high, medium and low potency based on the TD ₅₀ value. Methods of estimating intakes and exposed populations are considered and an approach which groups these into broad categories is developed. The hazard and exposure assessments are then combined to derive the Population Carcinogenicity Index.

Key Words: carcinogens • genotoxic • food regulation • ranking

Human & Experimental Toxicology, Vol. 15, No. 9, 739-746 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/096032719601500904


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