Exposure assessment of the Belgian population to pesticide residues through fruit and vegetable consumption

Wendie Liliane Claeys (1) , Simon de Voghel (2) , Jean-François Schmit (3) , Valérie Vromman (3) , Luc Pussemier (2)

1 Policy Control
2 CODA-CERVA-VAR
3 FASFC

The exposure of the Belgian consumer to pesticide residues via the consumption of fruit and vegetables was determined based on data collected in the Belgian food consumption survey performed by the Scientific Institute for Public Health and data of the monitoring programme 2005 of the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain. A first screening of pesticide residue exposure was performed by a deterministic approach. For most pesticide residues studied, the exposure was hundred times lower than the ADI (‘acceptable daily inatke'). However, for a high consumer (97.5th percentile of consumption) the intake could reach 23% of the ADI for imazalil, 15% for chlorpropham, 14% for the dithiocarbamates, 10% for dimethoate and lambda-cyhalothrin, and 9% for chlorpyriphos. Nevertheless, probabilistic exposure assessment performed on these pesticides in a second phase of the study, indicated that except for chlorpropham, the probability to exceed the ADI is much lower than 0.1%.

Mots clés: Life Sciences

Wendie Liliane Claeys, Simon de Voghel, Jean-François Schmit, Valérie Vromman, Luc Pussemier. Exposure assessment of the Belgian population to pesticide residues through fruit and vegetable consumption. Food Additives and Contaminants, 2008, 25 (07), pp.851-863. ⟨10.1080/02652030701854741⟩. ⟨hal-00577445⟩