Dietary intake estimate for perfluorooctanesulphonic acid (PFOS) and other perfluorocompounds (PFCs) in UK retail foods following determination using standard addition LC–MS/MS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The analysis of 252 food samples (UK-produced and imported) purchased from a variety of retail outlets in the UK was undertaken for the presence of perfluorooctanesulphonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and nine other perfluorocompounds (PFCs). A limit of quantification (LOQ) of 1 microg/kg was achieved for all target analytes, in all samples. Standard addition was used for quantification of PFC levels. All 11 of the targeted PFCs were detected in 75 individual food items. In 70% of the samples, including all meat other than offal, none of the analytes were present above the LOD. The highest levels found were 59 microg/kg perfluorooctanesulphonic acid (PFOS) and 63 microg/kg total PFCs (SigmaPFCs) in an eel sample, and 40 microg/kg PFOS (62 microg/kg SigmaPFCs) in a whitebait sample. The highest level in an offal sample was 10 microg/kg, in a wild roe deer liver. There were six samples with SigmaPFCs >15 microg/kg (fish, shellfish, crustaceans), a further seven samples with SigmaPFCs ranging 11-15 microg/kg (including a liver), nine with SigmaPFCs ranging 6-10 microg/kg (fish and livers), 31 with SigmaPFCs in the range 2-5 microg/kg (including kidneys, popcorn and processed peas) and a further 22 with SigmaPFCs close to the LOD of 1 microg/kg (including eggs and potatoes). These concentrations indicate that UK consumers are being exposed to a low level of PFC contamination from food. The estimated upper bound dietary intake of 10 ng/kg bodyweight (bw)/day of PFOS for average adult consumers is well below the 0.15 microg (150 ng)/kg bw tolerable daily intake (TDI) set by the European Food Safety Authority. The lower bound adult dietary intake estimate of 1 ng/kg bw/day is similar to estimates undertaken and reported in countries such as Canada, Germany and Spain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".