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One of the real challenges for regulators in recent years has been how to respond to very low levels of genotoxic carcinogens in food.These are chemicals that have the potential to cause cancer by damaging the genetic material in the cell.This differs from the types of chemicals which exhibit a threshold below which any exposure is thought to have no effect on health.

Because experts are unable to identify a threshold for genotoxic carcinogens below which damage will not occur our regulatory response has been to keep levels as low as practicable by preventing their deliberate presence in food and by minimising unavoidable contamination and natural occurrence.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recently published its report on an international conference on risk assessment of compounds that are both genotoxic and carcinogenic.

The experts at this conference agreed with UK experts that it is not possible to identify safe levels of intake of these chemicals, or to identify a reliable estimate of the cancer risk at different intakes. All agree that if the doses causing cancer in laboratory animals are very much higher than the amounts that we are exposed to (referred to as the Margin of Exposure), then the risk is likely to be very small. However, there is not yet general agreement on the health significance of different sizes of Margins of Exposure.