27 agosto 2007

Intake of OTA and DON through beer consumption in Belgium

On “Food Additives and Contaminants” (volume 24, issue 8, pp. 910-916) has been published an article related to a study, based on the results of the recent Belgian food survey, to evaluate ochratoxin A (OTA) and deoxynivalenol (DON) exposure of the Belgian population through beer consumption.

Data come from analysis on conventional and organic beers and are based on average daily intake (0.638 liters).
For the consumers of organic beers, the daily intake of OTA was 0.86 (in 2003), 1.76 (in 2004) and 0.72 (in 2005) ng kg-1 body weight (bw).
Using the 97.5th percentile of beer consumption, the corresponding OTA daily intakes were 2.65, 5.44 and 2.24 ng kg-1 bw, which are close or above the tolerable daily intake (TDI) of 5 ng kg-1 bw.
For the consumers of conventional beers, the OTA intakes were low: 0.23, 0.23 and 0.11 ng kg-1 bw day-1 for the average beer consumption against 0.72, 0.73 and 0.34 ng kg-1 bw day-1 when the 97.5th percentile level was considered.
As for the DON intake, the estimates were quite low for both conventional and organic beer consumers (when the provisional maximum TDI of 1 µg kg-1 bw was considered, both for average and 97.5 percentile consumption).

The results showed that beer could be an important contributor to OTA exposure, even though a declining trend seems to be apparent during the last year of monitoring. Therefore, efforts should be devoted to maintain the OTA levels as low as reasonably achievable, especially for organic beer.

(Authors: P. Harcz, E.K. Tangni, O. Wilmart, E. Moons, C. van Peteghem, S. De Saeger, Y.-J. Schneider, Y. Larondelle, L. Pussmier)