Populations calculation

In an exposure or risk assessment, the population of interest is implicitly or explicitly defined. An implicit definition is made by selecting one of the available food consumption surveys in the Compute option. For example, by selecting the food survey ‘NL-Toddlers’ with corresponding consumption data, the Dutch population of toddlers is implicitly considered as the population of interest.

The selection of a survey may be followed by a subset selection of individuals or selection on the level of individual days. Subset selection is a further specification of the implicitly defined population. E.g., the Dutch population of toddlers is restricted to females by selecting the gender level ‘Female’ in the Individual subset menu. The implicitly defined population becomes the Dutch female toddlers.

Although implicit definition of the population of interest works fine, there is a need to make it more explicit that the focus of an assessment is on the population. The user should be aware that assessments are about assessing the exposure or risk in a population of interest. This becomes even more urgent when dietary exposures are combined with non-dietary exposures. Without explicitly specifying the population of interest, the exposure of Dutch toddlers may unintentionally be combined with non-dietary exposures of e.g. adult operators. The explicit definition of a population is made by selecting a population datasource in the Use data option. By specifying population properties like age, gender or any other property, the population may be further restricted.

When the population of interest is explicitly defined, (Use data option), subset selections are based on the data in the IndividualProperties table referring to populations in the Populations table..

Subset selection