Variability and uncertainty assessment of patulin exposure for preschool children in Flanders

Abstract: The objective of the present study was to evaluate the patulin exposure of children consuming organic, handcrafted or conventional apple juice through a probabilistic approach and to evaluate the effectiveness of several risk management options aiming to reduce the risk for children due to patulin exposure. However, a large part of the data on patulin contamination of apple juice fell under the limit of detection (LOD). Different methods were tested to deal with these so-called left censored data and a uniform distribution with uncertain bounds was selected to handle this censorship. Variability and uncertainty assessment of patulin exposure showed that 0.9% [90% confidence interval (CI): 0.3–1.8%] of the children consuming only organic apple juice exceed the tolerable daily intake (TDI). For consumers of conventional and handcrafted apple juice this was respectively 0.1% [90% CI: 0–0.3%] and 0% [90% CI: 0–0.2%]. Reduction of the patulin contamination in apple juice to concentrations below 25μg/kg reduced the percentage of the children exceeding the TDI to 0% [90%CI: 0–0.2%] for organic apple juice. Reduction of the apple juice consumption was less effective than a reduction of the patulin concentration in apple juice and is only useful when the patulin concentration of apple juice is below 25μg/kg. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]