Two days ago, the European Commission asked EFSA to provide scientific assistance on the risks for human health related to the possible presence of dioxins in pork and products containing pork.
The food safety agency said it calculated several exposure scenarios for both average and high consumers assuming three different dioxin concentrations in the pork and three different proportions of contaminated meat.
“In the most likely scenario, if someone ate an average amount of Irish pork each day throughout the period of the incident (90 days), 10 per cent of which was contaminated at the highest recorded concentration of dioxins, the body burden would increase by approximately 10 per cent,” stated the agency.
However, EFSA said that it considers this increase to be of no concern for this single event.
The agency added that, in a very extreme case, if someone ate a large amount of Irish pork each day throughout the period of the incident (90 days), 100 per cent of which was contaminated at the highest recorded concentration of dioxins, the authority concludes that the safety margin embedded in the tolerable weekly intake (TWI) would be considerably undermined:
“Given that the TWI has a 10-fold built in safety margin, EFSA considers that this unlikely scenario would reduce protection, but not necessarily lead to adverse health effects,” concluded the agency.