Ex-ante assessment of sample pooling implementation on the dietary exposure to nDL-PCB in meat

The implementation of sample pooling - a group testing strategy where multiple samples are combined into a pool and tested with a single analysis - was shown to be an effective strategy for both food companies and food safety authorities to strengthen the surveillance of food chemical safety. This paper aims to assess the benefit that would have a surveillance based on sample pooling for human health, using the exposure to meat Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) as a case study. It evaluates the exposure to non-dioxin-like (nDL-) PCB in pork meat in France by comparing sample pooling (18,275 tested carcasses) with current (731 tested carcasses) and systematic testing (23 million tested carcasses), along with two scenarios reflecting most plausible developments in the pork industry: Two-faced Sector scenario and Regional Magnet. For this purpose, a probabilistic approach using simulations driven by survey data and scenarios assesses the adults' exposure. The results show that sample pooling is an effective monitoring method for reducing exposure, with one scenario reducing the number of French adults exceeding the Tolerable Weekly Intake (TWI) for dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs by 10,000, and the other scenario by 20,000. In both prospective scenarios, sample pooling lies between current and systematic testing, not far from systematic testing.