Report on exposure assessment tools and associated training materials

Food may contain hazardous substances such as contaminants or residues from pesticides or food packaging materials. Food risk assessment requires various types of data (e.g., chemical concentrations, food consumption and health hazards). There are already some well-established datasets (e.g., in EFSA collections), but also emerging datasets (e.g., data from total diet studies) which can be very useful for food risk assessment analysis. Tools for food risk assessment which use this data also exist, but these require well-formatted input data. Data harmonization and data conversion are therefore essential steps in the assessment process. In addition, food risk assessment is complex and is constantly evolving, adopting more complex statistical approaches as the discipline develops. Therefore, it is useful to develop demonstrator software to facilitate understanding and guide different identified user groups including risk assessors and low-end-users. Task 4.3 of the FNS-Cloud project aims to create e-services that enable two examples of user communities; low-end users (such as consumers or potential professional users that are not experts for TDS concept or exposure assessment) and researchers/risk assessors, to evaluate and visualize chemical food safety data (considered high-end users). Low-end users will be able to use concentration data from total diet studies (TDS) within the decision-making processes in their daily life, e.g., in the supermarket when purchasing foods. High-end users, e.g., risk assessors and researchers, will be able to use TDS or monitoring data for higher-tier more complex risk assessments. Specifically, the latter approach will use the probabilistic assessment with the Monte Carlo Risk Assessment (MCRA) tool. With the tools and services being developed within FNS-Cloud there are five phases to this work split over WP4 (Use cases) and WP5 (Demonstrators), covering specification, implementation and testing (Task 4.3) and improvement and evaluation (in WP5). For each use case, demonstrator software has been developed. In this report the training materials and user guides of these five demonstrators are outlined. Four demonstrators are using the exposure assessment tool MCRA and one demonstrator is based on a consumer app. The four demonstrators using MCRA are TDS-exposure harmonised, TDS-exposure German children to methylmercury, TDS-exposure Belgian adults to nickel and acute cumulative exposure to pesticides.