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Consumer Health & Wellness
June 2008 - Vol 3, Issue 6
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Greetings,

I recently attended a workshop on "Pesticides and Contaminants in Food - the safety issue" organised by RELAY and hosted by UCD in Dublin. The discussion varied from monitoring of pesticides and contaminants to the best methods of assessing consumer exposure to contaminants.

Reminder: don't forget to save these dates in your diary: Thursday & Friday the18th & 19th of September 2008, for the Creme meeting in Dublin. The agenda will be available soon, see the article below for more details.

The workshop was attended by representatives from government regulators, industry and the research community. The morning session, which covered data and exposure assessments, was chaired by Dr. Rhodri Evans of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland

Teagasc outlined the work they are doing in their National Food Residue Database project. This comprehensive open access database provides monitoring results from multiple sources of contaminants in food in Ireland including veterinary medicines, pesticides, radioactive substances, heavy metals, dioxins and other contaminants. The database can be accessed at http://nfrd.teagasc.ie.

Dr. Dan O'Sullivan from the Pesticide Control Service (PCS) discussed monitoring Pesticide residues in Food. Fruit, vegetables, cereals and foods of animal origin are routinely monitored at their facility. The PCS are working with Creme to produce exposure results for the 250+ pesticides that they monitor.

Prof. Mike Gibney from UCD gave a talk on food chemical exposure using probabilistic methods. Aine Hearty and Aileen Connolly, also from UCD, presented their work on pesticide exposure of the Irish population which they have been working on using the national residue database and Creme.

During the discussion the point was made that the probabilistic model that UCD used in this assessment was actually conservative since it didn't include processing factors for all foods. This shows that progress is being made in the area of probabilistic modelling as the method is now well understood by industry, government and researchers.
Remember to save these dates: Thursday & Friday the 18th & 19th of September 2008.

On the 18th and 19th September we are hosting a Creme Food Safety and Nutrition meeting in Dublin. This meeting will be both a user group meeting and an opportunity for those who have not yet used Creme to explore methods of consumer intake and exposure assessments.

Full agenda for the meeting will be provided soon.
We have expanded CRN to open it up to more people in order to generate more collaboration and discussion. It is no longer required to register in order to read comments but to post comments you need to be registered and logged in.

There are a number of new items of interest in the online Creme Research Network (CRN) including a new section which aggregates global food safety news.

The Creme newsletter is our way of communicating with you - the food, nutrition and chemical safety professionals of this world. You have received this newsletter either because: you have signed up for it, you have expressed an interest in our Creme products and services over the last number of years, we have worked on a project together or you have joined CRN.

Creme promotes health and safety by enabling industry, regulators and researchers to understand consumer intakes and exposures. If you have any questions or queries on our articles or if you would like us to discuss a particular topic, please contact us. This and all previous newsletters are available at: the Creme Newsletter site.

Yours Sincerely,
Cronan McNamara
Creme Software Ltd.

phone: +353 1 677 0071