Acute Reference Dose en acute innameberekeningen: Nationale en internationale ontwikkelingen.

In the project "Acute toxicity and risk assessment", one of the goals was to actively participate in activities that promote international harmonisation of the Acute Reference Dose (ARfD) concept. At the international level, the Joint Meeting of Pesticides Residues of the WHO and FAO develops international harmonised guidance for setting the ARfD in which RIVM/SIR contributes. A final EU guidance document is not yet released but the EU guidance will probably follow the WHO strategy in general. For acute food intake calculations, the introduction of probabilistic exposure tools is an important issue. International harmonisation as propmoted by VWS appears to be well developed now for pesticides but the following specific subjects will need further (policy) attention: 1) use of ARfD for both preventive risk assessment and inspection tasks, 2) use of ARfD in other chemical frameworks, 3) procedure for setting provisional national ARfD values for pesticides without an official European ARfD, 4) mixed sampling during inspection measurements (e.g. virtual cumulative exposure to various pesticides), and 5) (inter)national harmonisation of probabilistic exposure calculations