No abstract

Lipophilic persistent environmental chemicals (LPECs) have the potential to accumulate within a woman’s body lipids over the course of many years prior to pregnancy, to partition into human milk, and to transfer to infants upon breastfeeding. As a result of this accumulation and partitioning, a breastfeeding infant’s intake of these LPECs may be much greater than his/her mother’s average daily exposure. Because the developmental period sets the stage for lifelong health, it is important to be able to accurately assess chemical exposures in early life. In many cases, current human health risk assessment methods do not account for differences between maternal and infant exposures to LPECs or for lifestage-specific effects of exposure to these chemicals. Because of their persistence and accumulation in body lipids and partitioning into breast milk, LPECs present unique challenges for each component of the human health risk assessment process, including hazard identification, dose-response assessment, and exposure assessment. Specific biological modeling approaches are available to support both dose-response and exposure assessment for lactational exposures to LPECs. Yet, lack of data limits the application of these approaches. The goal of this review is to outline the available approaches and to identify key issues that, if addressed, could improve efforts to apply these approaches to risk assessment of lactational exposure to these chemicals.

No abstract

Standard TPN leads to a decrease in gut mucosal protein synthesis in rats, and this decrease can be partially attenuated by adding nutrients for the gut to the TPN mixture.

This report summarizes the current state of scientific knowledge regarding food allergy and celiac disease, including information on dose-response relationships for major food allergens and for gluten, respectively. The report presents the biological concepts and data needed to evaluate various approaches to establish thresholds that would be scientifically sound and efficacious in relation to protection of public health. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and the application of each is limited by the availability of appropriate data. It is likely that there will be significant scientific advances in the near future that will address a number of the limitations identified in this report. The Threshold Working Group expects that any decisions on approaches for establishing thresholds for food allergens or for gluten would require consideration of additional factors not covered in this report. Furthermore, one option that is implicit in the report's discussion of potential approaches is a decision not to establish thresholds at this time.