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P. M. BOLGER, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Office of Plant and Dairy Foods and Beverages, 5100 Paint Branch Pkwy., HFS-308, College Park, MD 20740-3835 In assessing risks of dietary constituents found in seafood, such as environmental contaminants, we must explicitly state the public health question we are attempting to answer. Risk assessment is often loosely defined and applied, and as a result, discussions of risk can often work towards different purposes. To many risk assessment is safety assessment which is essentially a statement of negligible or zero risk. It results in the derivation of what is known as an acceptable daily intake, but is also known by other names, such as the tolerable daily intake, the reference dose or minimal risk level. It is a methodology that includes an identification of a single dose level from an animal or human study which is called the no observed adverse effect level and the application of safety/uncertainty factors. The latter are used to account for the uncertainty associated with inter- and intra-species dose extrapolation. The methodology is useful for determining which exposures are of insignificant public health concern. However, the determination that an exposure is “unsafe” or a population is “at risk” should lead to a consideration of risk as a matter of degree. This will allow for the inclusion of other important issues such as the avoidability of exposure, nutritional benefits and risks and competing dietary risks. Risks associated with toxicants in seafood are often controlled by exposure reduction. When exposure recommendations are developed for the consumption of certain foods, however, they must balance the risks against the benefits associated with those practices to maximize public health. Quantitative methods can be used to evaluate the risks and health benefits associated with environmental exposures. These methods can be generalized to evaluate the merits of other public health and risk management programs that involve trade-offs between risks and benefits.
Session 28, Good fish, bad fish: Perceptions of benefits and risk
2005 IFT Annual Meeting, July 15-20 - New Orleans, Louisiana |