Statement on Tolerable Weekly Intake for Cadmium

Summary

This source page is a secondary-citation provenance record for the EFSA 2011 statement on tolerable weekly intake for cadmium. The primary document was not directly accessible during this ingest pass (Wiley journal access returned 403; EFSA Journal landing page redirects do not return downloadable text). The information recorded here is sourced from references to the 2011 statement within other ingested documents, principally EFSA Cd 2009 (which the 2011 statement reaffirms) and JECFA 91st 2022 (which references the EFSA-JECFA divergence the 2011 statement addresses). Direct ingestion of the primary document is flagged as pending future work; the source page should be re-verified and SHA-recorded when the primary PDF is acquired.

Key facts (from secondary citations)

The EFSA CONTAM Panel issued a statement in 2011 reaffirming the 2009 tolerable weekly intake for cadmium of 2.5 µg per kilogram body weight per week, in response to the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives’ 2010 establishment of a different reference value (the provisional tolerable monthly intake of 25 µg/kg b.w./month, equivalent to approximately 5.83 µg/kg b.w./week, established at JECFA’s 73rd meeting). The 2011 statement explained the methodological basis of the divergence and concluded that the EFSA TWI of 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week remained appropriate for European Union health-based guidance.

Provenance notes

License public-reference-only (default for EFSA scientific outputs). The primary PDF is at the canonical EFSA URL listed in access_url; SHA-256 verification is pending future ingest. The information recorded above is consistent across the two primary documents (EFSA 2009 and JECFA 91st 2022) that cite this statement; specific quantitative claims that could only be in the 2011 statement itself (updated dietary exposure estimates, specific methodological detail of the EFSA-JECFA reconciliation) are not recorded here pending direct ingestion.

The reaffirmation of the 2009 TWI without numeric change means the operative EU regulatory cadmium reference value is still 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week. The 2011 statement matters for the wiki primarily as the EU-side articulation of why EU and JECFA values diverge despite operating against overlapping primary literature, which is a load-bearing fact for the cadmium synthesis.

Implications

• Certification: confirms that the EU regulatory floor for cadmium remains 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week despite the JECFA-aligned international value being 2.3x more permissive. HMT&C calibration to the EFSA TWI (the EU operative value) is the more conservative posture and the more appropriate reference for products entering the EU market.
• Courses: the 2009/2011 reaffirmation pair is a teachable example of how regulatory bodies handle methodological disagreement in the literature without rapidly revising thresholds in either direction.
• App: no new structured data; the 2.5 TWI value already operative in app reference-value benchmarking remains correct.

Wiki pages updated on ingest

• Cadmium
• EFSA — Tolerable Weekly Intake for Cadmium, 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week
• synthesis

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.