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PBDE exposure from food in Ireland: optimising data exploitation in probabilistic exposure modelling

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 21, pages 565–575 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are a class of brominated flame retardants added to plastics, polyurethane foam, electronics, textiles, and other products. These products release PBDEs into the indoor and outdoor environment, thus causing human exposure through food and dust. This study models PBDE dose distributions from ingestion of food for Irish adults on congener basis by using two probabilistic and one semi-deterministic method. One of the probabilistic methods was newly developed and is based on summary statistics of food consumption combined with a model generating realistic daily energy supply from food. Median (intermediate) doses of total PBDEs are in the range of 0.4–0.6 ng/kgbw/day for Irish adults. The 97.5th percentiles of total PBDE doses lie in a range of 1.7–2.2 ng/kgbw/day, which is comparable to doses derived for Belgian and Dutch adults. BDE-47 and BDE-99 were identified as the congeners contributing most to estimated intakes, accounting for more than half of the total doses. The most influential food groups contributing to this intake are lean fish and salmon which together account for about 22–25% of the total doses.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Beat Brüschweiler, Lukas Tlustos, two anonymous reviewers and Christine F. Chaisson for helpful comments, and Harald von Waldow for providing the computer infrastructure to run the EBM models. We also thank Tobias Rotzler for programming a tool to perform ROS on a large number of data sets. This work was primarily funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    David Trudel, Natalie Von Goetz, Martin Scheringer & Konrad Hungerbühler

  2. Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), Dublin, Ireland

    Christina Tlustos

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  1. David Trudel
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Correspondence to Natalie Von Goetz.

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Trudel, D., Tlustos, C., Von Goetz, N. et al. PBDE exposure from food in Ireland: optimising data exploitation in probabilistic exposure modelling. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 21, 565–575 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2010.41

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