A tiered approach of hazard-prioritization and risk-ranking for chemical hazards in food commodities: Application for selected mycotoxins.

[Display omitted] • A tiered method was developed to evaluate health risk of mycotoxins in infant foods. • The tiered method included hazard prioritization and margin of exposure-based risk ranking. • The MOE-based probabilistic risk ranking method was used to rank 19 mycotoxins in infant foods. • Tenuazonic acid, Deoxynivalenol, and Enniatin B1 were top three mycotoxins with highest risk. Chemical hazards in foods, especially naturally occurring food contaminants like mycotoxins, are of serious public health concern. It is important to develop a practical framework to assess and rank health risks of chemical contaminants which can be further utilized by regulatory agencies to prioritize resources for risk assessment and management. In this study, a tiered hazard-prioritization and risk-ranking approach, which included two steps: exposure-based screening and margin of exposure (MOE)-based probabilistic risk ranking; was proposed to efficiently identify and rank chemicals of health concerns. Given the exposure-based hazard prioritization, chemicals with negligible or low health risks were first excluded. The remaining chemicals, imposing a higher health risk, were then ranked to facilitate risk-based decision making. The proposed approach was applied to identify and rank the mycotoxins with substantial health concerns in food commodities randomly sampled in China. A total of 19 mycotoxins were analyzed in 783 food commodities, including infant cookie, noodle, rice flour samples, wheat flour, millet, and rice. Results showed that the mycotoxins in infant foods with the highest health risk were Tenuazonic acid, Deoxynivalenol, and Enniatin B1, but as indicated by the probabilistic MOE estimation, the risks were still in the acceptable range and generally lower than the risks imposed by trace elements (e.g., Arsenic and Cadmium). The health risks of the other 16 mycotoxins were negligible mainly due to their low exposure levels. This study demonstrated that the proposed tiered approach was an efficient and effective tool to quantify and prioritize health risks in support of human health risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]