Client
A food and beverage organisation.
Background
On a regular basis over a period of nearly 20 years, bibra has provided a multi-national company with first drafts, or updates, of concise reports on individual or groups of food additives and contaminants. The requirement is for a summary of the most up-to-date, pertinent data on the toxicology of the substances, together with any relevant health-based guidance values (HBGVs), plus information on their levels in food and on estimated dietary intake levels.
Project goals
Existing reports prepared by the client have been regularly updated, and new reports drafted. As well as making good use of existing Expert Group reports, searches have been conducted of the primary literature for any subsequent developments that might have an impact on the compound’s status. The aim is for these concise reports to be written in such a way that they are accessible to the lay person.
Approach and outcome
The bibra toxicologists have many years of experience in the preparation of hazard reports on chemicals. Our first port of call for this project is our own in-house database (TRACE) and databank, which we have been running for over 50 years. This provides a quick and efficient route to Expert Group evaluations on the chemicals of interest, and is more up to date and comprehensive in its indexing than is eChemPortal, with a wider coverage of Expert Groups. All such documents in TRACE will have been chemically indexed, and any relevant reviews can be retrieved by a simple search on the CAS Registry number and an appropriate code (for expert reviews). The best of these are then used as the basis for the concise report, as they should identify the key data. In addition, searches are conducted of the primary literature published since the Expert Group reports (or more precisely, from 2 years before the publication date of those reports), limited to TRACE (at the request of the client), to see if there have been any further developments that might alter the compound’s toxicological status. After summarising all of the key data, we then go back over the primary papers identified via TRACE, to ensure that there are no gaps in the data that might have been missed by the Expert Groups.
Over the course of nearly 20 years, bibra has provided the client with up-to-date evaluations of individual compounds or groups of compounds. These summarise the most critical data on toxicology, HBGVs, and estimates of food levels and dietary intake, and are written in such a way that they can be readily understood by the lay person.
