State Already Does Enough To Ensure Food
In your December 1999 editorial, “State Must Do More to Make Food Safe”, you alleged that Department of Health understated the risks of eating cucumbers contaminated with heptachlor expoxide (HE), claiming that the risks to children were not considered. In fact, the Department’s health assessment overestimated the risk to all Hawai’i consumers, including children.
The hazards to children and adults were addressed in the following assumptions: That children and adults consumed only cucumbers from the contaminated field; That all the cucumbers consumed were unwashed, unpeeled and contained the maximum concentrations of HE; and That children and adults ate contaminated cucumbers every day every day the cucumbers were in the marketplace. In light of the above assumptions, we compared a consumer’s manual theoretical dose to the amount of HE that produces adverse health effects in laboratory animals. The lowest does causing adverse health effects in laboratory animals was more than 500 times higher than the dose a chilled would receive from eating contaminated cucumbers, and 200 times than the adult dose.
Based on the conservative assumptions used to calculated the risk and the small number of cucumber samples exceeding the action level of 20 ppb (only 2 of 52 samples collected), coupled with the fact that HE contamination was not found in any of the other crops sampled (except for trace amounts in daikon), we believe that all consumers were adequately protected with a large margin of safety.
Bruce S. Anderson, PhD, M.P.H
Director of Health, State of Hawai’i
Volume 10, Number 9 March 2000
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