EFSA 2024 — Emerging chemical risks in food and feed (technical report)

This 42-page EFSA technical report (Supporting Publication 2024:EN-8992; Question No. EFSA-Q-2024-00477; approved 9 August 2024) is a horizon-scanning overview of EFSA’s emerging-chemical-risk identification activities for the period 2020-2023. It is produced by the Knowledge, Innovation and Partnership Management (KNOW) Unit under Strategic Objective N°2 of the EFSA Strategy 2027. The report indexes six EFSA projects plus the work of the Emerging Risks Exchange Network (EREN) and the Stakeholder Discussion Group on Emerging Risks (StaDG-ER), and closes with a SWOT analysis of EFSA’s current approach and forward-looking policy/cooperation recommendations.

For Heavy Metal Index purposes the report is contextual rather than measurement-bearing. Heavy metals appear in three discrete indexing contexts — the CLEFSA climate-change scoring exercise (Issues 116 and 120), one sentence on circular-economy insect feed, and one EREN briefing-note row on chaga mushroom. No concentrations, exposure estimates, or sample sizes are reported within this document for any heavy metal.

Key numbers

• Reporting period covered: 2020-2023.
• EFSA projects indexed: SCREENER (212 REACH substances prioritised → 15 quantified → 12 risk-characterised, Table 1); TIM (3000 articles/year screened per chemical via JRC TIM Analytics, 0.29% second-screen relevance for known REACH chemicals, 2.65% for newly identified chemicals); CLEFSA (19 contaminant emerging issues characterised, Table 4; 6 nutritional-quality issues, Table 5); EuroCigua I (209 ciguatera cases in 34 EU outbreaks 2012-2019; overall incidence 0.0054/100,000; Canary Islands incidence 0.47/100,000); EuroCigua II (launched August 2022, ends September 2025); OCEANS (18-month foresight study launched late 2022 on coastal/open-sea mining, marine aquaculture, sea transport/trade); Circular Economy (focus narrowed to food waste, former food products, agri-food processing co/by-products).
• CLEFSA contaminants table (Table 4): 19 emerging issues scored; those scored by ≥5 experts and described in scoresheets (in bold in the source) include deoxynivalenol/zearalenone, ciguatoxins, β-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA), cyanotoxins, domoic acid, palytoxin, okadaic acid, pinnatoxins, tetrodotoxin/TTX analogues. Issue 116 (Mercury) and Issue 120 (Heavy metals as As, Pb, Cd) are listed in Table 4 but are not in the bold “scored by ≥5 experts” subset.
• CLEFSA bidimensional impact-likelihood diagram (Figure 3, near-future scenario): heavy metals are plotted as a single bundled dot labelled “Heavy metals as As, Pb, Cd, Hg” — Mercury is combined with As/Pb/Cd in the figure even though Issue 116 (Mercury) is listed separately in Table 4. The heavy-metals dot sits in the upper portion of the 33-66%-likelihood band, near the 66-90% boundary, in a cluster with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, DON/ZON, TTX/TTX analogues, and hormones. Pinnatoxins, plastic debris, palytoxin, and ochratoxin A sit lower in the 33-66% band. Saxitoxin, ciguatoxins, domoic acid, okadaic acid, cyanotoxins, and azaspiracid plot in the 66-90%-likelihood band. BMAA and pyrrolizidine alkaloids are notable low-likelihood outliers (10-33% and below).
• CLEFSA nutritional-quality table (Table 5): six issues; selenium (Issue 122), manganese (Issue 124), zinc (Issue 126), and iron (Issue 127) scored as high-priority issues characterised by lower micronutrient content in plants associated with elevated atmospheric CO₂ (cites Myers et al. 2014; EFSA 2020). These are deficiency concerns, not contamination.
• Circular-economy section (§2.6): single sentence — “a wide range of chemical hazards were reported including heavy metals (in particular high levels of the heavy metals Cd and Ni in prepupae), dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), mineral oil hydrocarbons, veterinary medicines, pesticides and the uptake of allergens by insects from the substrate, e.g. gluten.” No numeric values; sourced to literature review (EFSA 2022).
• EREN/StaDG-ER 2022 Estonia briefing note (Table 7): “The contents of minerals, vitamins, heavy metals, and oxalates in chaga mushroom (Inonotus obliquus)” — classified as “Consumer trend” / “further info needed”; flagged because chaga consumption is increasing in Estonia and identified heavy metals and oxalates are noted as possible harmful constituents alongside the advertised health benefits. No concentrations.
• SCREENER Table 1: 12 REACH chemicals quantified in plant- and animal-based matrices (wheat flour, carrots, kale, potatoes, peas, strawberries, oranges, chicken, pork, beef, trout, herring, salmon, cow milk, hen eggs); three chemicals (3,4-dimethylaniline, quinoline, n-methylacetamide) flagged for additional analysis based on Initial Margin of Exposure ≤1. None of the 12 SCREENER analytes are heavy metals.
• EFSA Emerging Chemical Risks Identification Working Group (ECRI WG) established; coordinates SCREENER and TIM follow-up activities.
• Briefing-note pipeline (Figure 2): draft → pre-assessment → (discarded / under-assessment) → (final-no-emerging-risk / emerging-risk / final-further-info-needed) → (under EREN recommendation / final-emerging-risk).

Methods (brief)

EFSA’s Environmental Scanning and Strategic Options Definition process runs two workflows. (1) Horizon Scanning workflow (Figure 1, eight steps): signal collection → gap analysis vs current strategy → relevance assessment → assessment of possible EU and international collaborations → competency needs / capacity-building → readiness/maturity assessment for regulatory science → decision at Preparedness Council → strategy update. (2) Emerging Risks Analysis workflow: structured briefing-note lifecycle handled within EREN (40+ EU Member State and EFTA risk assessors plus observers from EC, ECDC, ECHA, EEA, WHO, FAO, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, US FDA) and StaDG-ER (private-sector, consumer-association, and NGO stakeholders). Emerging issues are scored against EFSA’s published criteria (Novelty, Soundness, Imminence, Severity, Scale) and three decisions are possible: concluded as emerging risk; impossibility to conclude due to insufficient information; not an emerging risk. The chemical projects use different methodologies — SCREENER uses LC-HRMS and LC-MS/MS multi-residue methods for qualitative screening (presence/absence) followed by quantitative analysis on prioritised chemicals; TIM uses the JRC TIM Analytics text/data-mining tool over Scopus, PATSTAT, and CORDIS plus the Europe Media Monitor news aggregator; CLEFSA uses crowdsourced expert scoring on a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis framework with near-future (2021-2050) climate scenarios versus reference (1981-2010) conditions; the OCEANS and Circular Economy projects use foresight workshops and participatory horizon-scanning exercises. The screening assistant DistillerSR is used for second-pass screening in the TIM workflow.

Limitations

• Horizon-scanning by design produces low-precision signals; the report itself documents (in §4 SWOT and the TIM evaluation) that the relevant-hit rate for chemical risks via TIM was 0.29% for known REACH chemicals and 2.65% for newly identified chemicals, and concludes that media monitoring and text-mining tools “are often not specific or not sensitive enough… especially when applied to broad areas like ‘emerging chemicals’.”
• The report is a meta-document indexing other studies; no primary occurrence data are presented for any heavy metal. The CLEFSA scoresheets referenced in Table 4 live in the supporting information of EFSA (2020), not in this report.
• The Circular Economy single-sentence reference to “high levels” of Cd and Ni in insect prepupae cites the broader EFSA (2022) Circular Economy review and is not quantified or matrix-resolved here.
• The 2022 Estonia chaga briefing note is classified “further info needed” (Table 7) — i.e., not yet concluded as an emerging risk; it is a watchlist entry, not a finding.

Implications

• Certification: Not threshold-bearing. The report establishes EU regulatory framing for emerging-chemical-risk identification under EFSA Strategy 2027 / Founding Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 (Article 34) and is appropriate background for HMTc regulatory-context narrative on EU horizon-scanning posture. The Circular Economy Cd/Ni-in-insect-prepupae flag is relevant to any future HMTc work on alternative-protein or novel-feed products where insect-derived ingredients are in scope.
• Courses: Useful for the EU regulatory-affairs module — illustrates how EFSA structures emerging-risk identification (EREN/StaDG-ER, briefing-note lifecycle, scoring criteria) and how horizon-scanning outputs feed back into the EFSA work programme.
• App: Not applicable. No occurrence data for ingredient-level contamination estimates.
• Microbiome: Not primary topic. The CLEFSA emerging-issues list does include marine biotoxins (ciguatoxins, BMAA, cyanotoxins, palytoxin, okadaic acid, pinnatoxins, tetrodotoxin), which are produced by microorganisms whose growth is sensitive to climate change; this is the closest microbiome-adjacent content and belongs on relevant WikiBiome pages rather than here.
• Cross-source signal: this is the second EFSA horizon-scanning meta-document in the corpus alongside efsa-food-safety-research-needs-2030; together they bracket EFSA’s research-prioritisation posture from 2019 (research-needs editorial) through 2024 (2020-2023 emerging-risks overview).

Wiki pages this source may touch

• arsenic — As listed in CLEFSA Issue 120 as climate-change-relevant emerging issue (regulatory/horizon-scanning context only).
• lead — Pb listed in CLEFSA Issue 120 (regulatory/horizon-scanning context only).
• cadmium — Cd listed in CLEFSA Issue 120, plus the circular-economy single-sentence flag on insect prepupae (regulatory/horizon-scanning context only).
• mercury — CLEFSA Issue 116 (regulatory/horizon-scanning context only).
• nickel — Circular-economy single-sentence flag on insect prepupae (regulatory/horizon-scanning context only).

Verification notes

• 2026-06-02 — Fresh-context audit subagent (verdict REVISE) flagged that the Figure 3 description omitted Hg from the heavy-metals dot label and placed the dot too centrally in the 33-66% band. Verified independently against p. 14 of the source PDF: the figure label is in fact “Heavy metals as As, Pb, Cd, Hg” (Mercury is bundled into the same dot) and the dot sits in the upper portion of the 33-66% band near the 66-90% boundary. Corrected the Figure 3 sentence accordingly.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. 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.