MRLs of concern for the active substance oxydemeton-methyl

摘要

The European Commission requested EFSA to provide an opinion on the safety of the existing MRLs of oxydemeton-methyl without specifying the actual MRLs of concern. In order to focus the assessment mainly on the MRLs that are of concern, EFSA decided to follow the tiered approach which resulted into the following conclusions and recommendations. At first, all the existing EC MRLs for oxydemeton-methyl were screened with regard to consumer safety by using the existing MRLs as input parameters for the EFSA PRIMo in order to identify potential consumer risks (scenario 1). As a result of this first screening, the existing EC MRLs for sugar beet, scarole, potatoes, melons, oranges, head cabbage, kohlrabi, watermelons, pineapples, apples, pears, grapefruit, bananas, mangoes, head lettuce and milk were identified as potential MRLs of concern regarding the acute consumer intake. In addition to the acute consumer risk, high exceedences of the ADI value were identified in the chronic intake assessment for 25 diets (up to 1090 of the ADI). Basically, this screening is expected to overestimate the real situation with regard to consumer exposure but in the case of oxydemeton-methyl additional uncertainties reducing the conservatism of the calculation are expected because two metabolites which are included in the residue definition for risk assessment are not included in the residue definition for enforcement. In the second step EFSA tried to perform refined intake calculations regarding the short and long-term intake (scenario 2). To solve the acute consumer risk it was necessary to lower the MRLs for the 15 abovementioned commodities at the LOQ of 0.01 mg/kg. However, after these refinements a chronic consumer risk still could not be excluded. Therefore the only option to ensure consumer safety is to lower all existing MRLs to the LOQ. Further more, EFSA proposes to lower the LOQ values to 0.02 mg/kg for cereals, tea, coffee, herbal infusions, cocoa, carob, hops and spices and to 0.01 mg/kg for all other commodities.