Chemical Contaminants in Foods: Understanding and Managing Risks

Diet has consistently been shown to be the dominant source of exposure to the majority of contaminants that pose a threat to human health. However, there is concern that current methods for detection, analysis and risk assessment of chemical residues in food may not accurately reflect the complex cocktail of contaminants to which different groups may be exposed.

Chemical contaminants in foods: Understanding and managing risks provides a comprehensive overview of new approach methodologies with the potential to identify and assess health risks from chemicals in food or feed more accurately and rapidly, including human biomonitoring, advances in in-vitro cell culture and in-silico methods and physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models. The book also considers how techniques such as adverse outcome pathways can inform more sophisticated, next-generation risk assessments to better protect the health of different groups in the population.

In a distinguished career, Dr Rob Theelen has worked as a toxicological scientist, policy officer and risk assessor for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, and the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) as well for the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). From 2002 to 2017 Dr Theelen was also Technical Assistant to the Chair of the Codex Committee on Contaminants in Food. He is involved in a number of EU programmes such as the Better Training for Safer Food (BTSF) Initiative and the Technical Assistance and Information Exchange (TAIEX) Platform established by the European Commission to support best practice in areas such as food safety amongst EU member state governments. He manages the Food Safety Portal which provides information on relevant EU legislation and calculation tools for assessing exposure risk for those involved in chemical risk management and assessment.

Gaud Dervilly holds a PhD in Food Science (2001) and a habilitation to supervise research (HDR, 2009) in Public Health. She is the Deputy Director of the LABERCA research unit (UMR 1329 INRAe/Oniris) and leads scientific research on chemical food safety, focusing on risk assessment through targeted and non-targeted mass spectrometry, including metabolomics.

Dr Szabina Stice is an accomplished toxicologist with over 21 years of experience in regulatory science, toxicology, and analytical chemistry. Dr Stice’s contributions extend globally through her work with the WHO’s Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), where she has co-authored safety evaluations for a variety of substances.