Letter to the Editor of "Food and Chemical Toxicology" regarding the paper "Refined assessment and perspectives on the cumulative risk resulting from the dietary exposure to pesticide residues in the Danish population" by Larsson et al.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Toxicology, Public Health, Food, Water and Energy Nexus
- Keywords
- Mixture toxicology, pesticide risk assessment
- Copyright
- © 2018 Backhaus et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Letter to the Editor of "Food and Chemical Toxicology" regarding the paper "Refined assessment and perspectives on the cumulative risk resulting from the dietary exposure to pesticide residues in the Danish population" by Larsson et al. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26947v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26947v1
Abstract
Larsson and coworkers recently presented a study in Food and Chemical Toxicology on the cumulative risks to the Danish population from dietary exposure to pesticide residues. They base their analysis on food monitoring data, spray journals, controlled field trials and food consumption data in the Danish population. A cumulative hazard-index (HI) approach is then used to estimate the overall risk from pesticide exposure, an approach well established in the literature. Based on an HI of 13-44%, the authors conclude that adverse health effects due to pesticide residues are “very unlikely” and equivalent to “1 glass of wine every seventh year”. Unfortunately, the paper fails to put the limitations of the underlying data and the applied methodology in context and it misinterprets the use of Assessment Factors in chemical safety assessment. The comparison of population-wide life-long involuntary exposure to pesticides with individual, time-limited, voluntary alcohol consumption is misleading, in particular in view that children are identified as the most vulnerable sub-population.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
We submitted this letter on the 15th of March 2018 to Prof. José L. Domingo, the Editor-in-Chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology as a commentary to the recent paper “Refined assessment and perspectives on the cumulative risk resulting from the dietary exposure to pesticide residues in the Danish population” by Martin Olof Larsson, Vibe Sloth Nielsen, Niels Bjerre, Frank Laporte, Nina Cedergreen, Food and Chemical Toxicology 111 (2018) 207–267, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2017.11.020 . As of today (21 May 2018), the letter is still in review. We will update this preprint as soon as we have received feedback from the journal.