Variability and uncertainty assessment of patulin exposure for preschool children in Flanders

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the patulin exposure of children consuming organic, handcrafted or conventional apple juice through a probabilistic approach and to evaluate the effectiveness of several risk management options aiming to reduce the risk for children due to patulin exposure. However, a large part of the data on patulin contamination of apple juice fell under the limit of detection (LOD). Different methods were tested to deal with these so-called left censored data and a uniform distribution with uncertain bounds was selected to handle this censorship. Variability and uncertainty assessment of patulin exposure showed that 0.9% [90% confidence interval (CI): 0.3–1.8%] of the children consuming only organic apple juice exceed the tolerable daily intake (TDI). For consumers of conventional and handcrafted apple juice this was respectively 0.1% [90% CI: 0–0.3%] and 0% [90% CI: 0–0.2%]. Reduction of the patulin contamination in apple juice to concentrations below 25 μg/kg reduced the percentage of the children exceeding the TDI to 0% [90%CI: 0–0.2%] for organic apple juice. Reduction of the apple juice consumption was less effective than a reduction of the patulin concentration in apple juice and is only useful when the patulin concentration of apple juice is below 25 μg/kg.