Human Biomonitoring of food contaminants in Spanish children: Design, sampling and lessons learned

Human Biomonitoring (HBM) studies are highly useful for evaluating population exposure to environmental contaminants and are being carried out in increasing numbers all over the world. The use of HBM in the field of food safety, in a risk assessment context, presents a growing interest as more health-based guidance values (HBGV) in biological matrices are derived, and can be used in a complementary way to the external exposure approaches such as total diet studies or surveillance programmes. The aims of the present work are: i) to describe the methodological framework of the BIOVAL study, a cross-sectional HBM program carried out by the Health Department of the Regional Government of Valencia (Spain), that is linked to the food safety official control, and is focused on children from 6 to 11 years of age ii) to explain and discuss the pre-analytical results iii) to report and discuss on lessons learned from its design and implementation. The study population included 666 children from whom urine and hair were taken in order to analyse different biomarkers of exposure to food pollutants.