Evaluation of certain contaminants in food: one-hundred-and-first meeting report of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives

Overview

The one-hundred-and-first meeting of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) was held in Geneva from 15 to 21 October 2025. The purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the safety of certain food contaminants, specifically inorganic and organic arsenic species.

This report presents the conclusions of a Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee convened to re-evaluate toxicological data on inorganic and organic arsenic species, including a reassessment of dietary exposure.

At its one-hundred-and-first meeting, JECFA reviewed new information that had become available since its previous evaluations (tenth, twenty seventh, thirty third, and seventy second meetings). This included data on biochemical and toxicological aspects, human studies, analytical methods, occurrence and contamination patterns in food, dietary exposure, dose–response relationships, as well as factors such as feed to food transfer, sampling, processing effects, and options for prevention and control.

The report summarizes the main conclusions of the Committee regarding the group acute reference dose and tolerable daily intake for inorganic and organic arsenic species, as well as the risk characterization and recommendations.