Probabilistic dietary risk assessment of pesticide residues in mango via FTM-p and Monte Carlo simulation

The Fruit Tree Model for pesticides (FTM-p) was combined with Monte Carlo simulation (5,000 iterations) to estimate the bioconcentration factor (BCF) and daily intake (DI) of 12 pesticides in a commercial Tommy Atkins orchard in Bahia, Brazil.

DI was estimated for adults (70 kg, 0.5 kg fruit day−1) and children (15 kg, 0.25 kg fruit day−1) and compared with each compound’s own reference dose (RfD), from the U.S. EPA or the FAO/WHO Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues; the groundwater ubiquity score (GUS) ranked availability in soil solution. For adults, every safety margin exceeded 4.1 and no simulation exceeded the RfD. For children, paclobutrazol was the only compound of concern (margin 1.8, exceedance probability 2.1%); azoxystrobin, despite the highest DI, remained low risk (margin 4.6) once its own acceptable daily intake replaced a surrogate.