Abstract
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are a serious food safety concern due to their persistence and toxic effects. To promote food safety and protect human health, it is important to understand the sources of POPs and how to minimize human exposure to these contaminants. The POPs Program within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), manually evaluates congener patterns of POPs-contaminated samples and sometimes compares the finding to other previously analyzed samples with similar patterns. This manual comparison is time consuming and solely depends on human expertise. To improve the efficiency of this evaluation, we developed software to assist in identifying potential sources of POPs contamination by detecting similarities between the congener patterns of a contaminated sample and potential environmental source samples. Similarity scores were computed and used to rank potential source samples. The software has been tested on a diverse set of incurred samples by comparing results from the software with those from human experts. We demonstrated that the software provides results consistent with human expert observation. This software also provided the advantage of reliably evaluating an increased sample lot which increased overall efficiency.
Highlights
Environment pollution has become a significant food safety concern due to pollutants detected in the environment being transferred to the food supply
After obtaining user input values, the software computes the weight-based similarity scores and ranks the potential source samples. This software has increased the sample capability to compare large numbers of potential source samples using their similarity to a contaminated food sample
Similarity scores are calculated between a contaminated sample and potential source samples
Summary
Environment pollution has become a significant food safety concern due to pollutants detected in the environment being transferred to the food supply. Exposure to environmental pollutants such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) [1,2,3,4,5,6] may cause various serious health effects including mutagenic, carcinogenic, and cardiovascular disease as well as endocrine disruption [7,8,9,10]. POPs are a class of carbon-based chemicals that may contain chlorine/bromine/fluorine in their structure. POPs either resistant to environmental degradation or slow to degrade. Many international and national regulations have been issued to reduce the release of POPs into the environment such as the Stockholm Convention [11,12,13,14], the United Nations Economic
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