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

Mango (Mangifera indica L.) production in Brazil's São Francisco Valley relies on intensive pesticide use, and residues translocated from soil solution to fruit reach the consumer directly. 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. Phloem flow dominated output uncertainty. Risk conclusions are decisively sensitive to the provenance of the reference dose. Paclobutrazol, which also ranks high on GUS, is the compound of greatest overall concern.