OpenFoodTox: EFSA's chemical hazards database

In food safety, hazard identification and hazard characterisation aim to determine safe levels of exposure for substances “reference values” to protect human health, animal health or the environment. Such reference values are most often derived for the relevant species by applying an uncertainty factor on the “reference point determined from the pivotal toxicological study.

Since its creation in 2002, EFSA scientific panels and staff have produced risk assessments for more than 4,400 substances in over 1,650 scientific opinions, statements and conclusions through the work of its scientists.

OpenFoodTox is a structured database summarising the outcome of hazard characterisation for human health and – depending on the relevant legislation and intended uses – animal health and the environment.

For each individual substance, the data model of OpenFoodTox has been designed using OECD Harmonised Template as a basis to collect and structure the data in a harmonised manner. OpenFoodTox reports the substance characterisation, EFSA outputs, reference points, reference values and genotoxicity.

In order to disseminate OpenFoodTox to a wider community, two sets of data can be downloaded:

1. Five individual spreadsheets extracted from the EFSA microstrategy tool providing for all compounds: a. substance characterisation, b.EFSA outputs, c.reference points, d.reference values and e.genotoxicity.

2. The full database.

OpenFoodTox contributes actively to EFSA’s 2020 Science Strategy and to the aim of widening EFSA’s evidence base and optimising access to its data as a valuable open source database that can be shared with all scientific advisory bodies and stakeholders with an interest in chemical risk assessment. In addition, OpenFoodTox has been submitted to the OECD’s Global Portal to Information on Chemical Substances (eChemPortal) so that individual substances can be searched as part of the national and international databases. Further description and associated references are described in the EFSA journal editorial (Dorne et al., 2017).