Exposure Assessment

47.          Estimated exposures to EAs were derived using data from the 2014 Total Diet Study (TDS)-Mycotoxin analysis (Stratton et al., 2017) and consumption data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) for all groups and subpopulation groups (Bates et al., 2014, 2016, 2020; Roberts et al., 2018).

48.          The TDS data was based on 28 food groups, which were further divided to produce 138 food categories. Total EAs and the epimers were determined by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) (Carbonell-Rozas et al., 2021). Ergocristine, ergotamine, ergocornine, ergosine, ergocryptine, ergometrine, ergocristinine, ergotaminine, ergocorninine, ergosinine, ergocryptinine and ergometrinine were the most frequent forms detected. More data on each specific subset are available in the TDS study report (Diet Study (TDS) – Mycotoxin Analysis Report, 2017).

49.          In some food groups, some EAs were found only below the limit of quantification (LOQ). Where EAs were detected below the LOQ, the occurrence values were expressed as lower bound (LB) and upper bound (UB), where 0 is used as the analytical value for the LB value and the limit of detection/quantification is used as the analytical value for the UB value. Consequently, for some food groups, the results of the exposure assessment have been expressed as both LB and UB.