Summary
The Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives re-evaluated lead at its seventy-third meeting (Geneva, 8-17 June 2010). The evaluation is reported in WHO Technical Report Series No. 960 (2011), with the full toxicological monograph published as the lead addendum in WHO Food Additives Series No. 64 (the same volume that carries the cadmium addendum evaluated at the same meeting). The Committee modelled dose-response for the critical endpoints using a benchmark-dose approach and concluded that the previously established provisional tolerable weekly intake of 25 µg per kilogram body weight per week could no longer be considered health-protective. Because the data for developmental neurotoxicity in young children showed no threshold, the Committee withdrew the PTWI and did not establish a replacement health-based guidance value. This withdrawal is the source of the regulatory framing that lead has no identified safe dietary level, adopted downstream by EFSA, the US FDA (Closer to Zero), ATSDR, and EPA.
The seventy-second meeting (Rome, 16-25 February 2010, WHO Technical Report Series 959) is a separate meeting that did not evaluate lead; it covered acrylamide, arsenic, deoxynivalenol, furan, mercury, and perchlorate. Attributing the lead PTWI withdrawal to the 72nd meeting or to TRS 959 is a citation error corrected across the wiki on 2026-08-09.
Key numbers
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Prior PTWI (withdrawn) | 25 µg Pb/kg b.w./week |
| Decision | PTWI withdrawn at the 73rd meeting (Geneva, June 2010); no replacement guidance value set |
| Rationale | Benchmark-dose modelling; no threshold demonstrated for developmental neurotoxicity, cardiovascular, or renal endpoints |
| Report of record | WHO Technical Report Series 960 (2011) |
| Toxicological monograph | WHO Food Additives Series No. 64, lead addendum |
Provenance notes
Primary source is the local WHO Food Additives Series No. 64 volume (raw/reports/9789241660648_eng.pdf, SHA-256 00e91ef8…), which contains the seventy-third-meeting lead addendum and is the same document of record used by Cadmium (Addendum), 73rd Meeting of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives — Safety Evaluation of Certain Food Additives and Contaminants. The report of record for the meeting’s conclusions is WHO Technical Report Series 960 (access URL above). License CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0-IGO per WHO standard publication terms; factual data extracted, no verbatim passages reproduced.
Wiki pages updated on ingest
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.
| Commit | Date | Change | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| a8052bb | 2026-08-09 | major | 1 source added; 4 sections added; narrative text revised |