High Exposure from Summary Statistics (HESS): application to the EFSA comprehensive European food consumption database.

While intake and exposure assessments can be readily carried out for a number of countries using complete datasets, the majority of European intake data are only available in the form of summary statistics published by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Only EFSA have access to the complete datasets which are used in scientific opinions it issues. The proposed High Exposure from Summary Statistics (HESS) method is derived from first principles, and compared to existing models used to estimate high consumer exposures from the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database. The method is applied to recent US consumption data to test its usefulness for deterministic and probabilistic exposure models, where comparisons between model results and detailed exposure assessments are possible. HESS is shown to provide a modest overestimation of the actual high consumer exposure, with a level of consistency and predictability that is much better than existing methods used with the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database.