@pipeworx/jecfa

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/jecfa/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 6

Safety evaluations from the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives: Acceptable Daily Intakes (ADIs), the committee’s conclusions, dietary-exposure findings, and the meeting reports and toxicological monographs behind them — for food additives, flavourings, food contaminants and veterinary drug residues.

JECFA is the body whose ADI a regulator cites when it sets a limit. This pack answers “has this substance been evaluated, and what intake did the committee judge acceptable” — not “is it permitted in yogurt in the EU”, which is the Codex GSFA / national-regulator question.

Tools

Coverage

3,245 substances: 777 food additives, 2,289 flavouring agents, 115 veterinary drugs, 64 food contaminants. Evaluations run from the committee’s earliest meetings to the present — aspartame, for instance, carries evaluations from 1981 through the 2023 re-evaluation at meeting 96.

Auth

None. Keyless, no registration, no quota.

Data sources

• Database: https://apps.who.int/food-additives-contaminants-jecfa-database/
• About JECFA: https://www.fao.org/food-safety/scientific-advice/jecfa/en/

The database has no documented API. The endpoints this pack calls are the ones backing the site’s own Kendo grid, read off the page. They are undocumented and unversioned, so they can drift without notice; the pack’s own gotcha comments (top of src/index.ts) record the shapes that were verified live.

Gotchas

Five upstream behaviours produce confidently wrong answers if taken at face value. All are guarded in the pack, but they matter if you extend it:

1. /SearchChemical/ByPartialName fabricates a row. It prepends your query string as a result with Id: 0 and a blank ADI — the UI’s “search for this literal text” affordance. Pass it through and you have invented a substance that was never evaluated. The pack drops every row with Id <= 0.

2. The same endpoint returns CAS_NO: null even when you searched by CAS. Searching 50-70-4 correctly finds SORBITOL, then reports its CAS as null. Only /ChemicalData/GetBy/par/ returns populated records, which is what jecfa_search actually calls.

3. /ChemicalData/GetBy/fir/ wants the character, not the id. Its companion /FilterData/Get/FirstCharacter hands you {"Id": 65, "Name": "A"}; passing 65 returns HTTP 500, passing A returns 501 rows.

4. INS/E-numbers are not searchable at all. ByPartialName/951 returns zero rows — INS numbers exist only on the server-rendered detail page. So jecfa_search resolves them through INS_INDEX, a build-time harvest of all 777 additive detail pages (486 carry an INS). Regenerate with node mcps/jecfa/scripts/build-ins-index.mjs after a meeting adds substances.

5. Detail-page citation rows use a different CSS class than every other field. ADI, comments, intake and meeting render in col-sm-8; the Report, Tox Monograph and Specification rows render in col-**md**-8 and wrap their text in an <a>. A parser matching only col-sm-8 returns null for all three — which reads as “JECFA published no report for this evaluation” when in fact the link to the TRS PDF was right there. The url on each citation is upstream’s own, usually a direct PDF on iris.who.int.

   Bare INS numbers are genuinely ambiguous — INS 160 denotes 19 separately evaluated carotenes — so the index maps each key to a list and jecfa_search returns every candidate with ambiguous: true rather than picking one. Upstream writes sub-forms inconsistently (100(i) and 100i both occur), so keys are normalized to alphanumerics; the generator and the pack must keep using the same normalization or every lookup silently misses.

Tools

• jecfa_search — Look up a food additive, flavouring, contaminant or veterinary drug in the WHO/FAO JECFA database by substance name, CAS number, or INS/E-number (E951, INS 951, 160a). Returns the Acceptable Daily Int
• jecfa_chemical — Fetch the complete JECFA record for one substance by its chemical id: chemical and synonym names, CAS and INS numbers, functional class, and every safety evaluation JECFA has made of it — evaluation y
• jecfa_by_functional_class — List every substance JECFA has evaluated in one functional class — sweeteners, preservatives, colours, emulsifiers, antioxidants and so on — or every substance in one of the four groups: food_additive
• jecfa_functional_classes — List the JECFA functional-class vocabulary — the 71 technological purposes a substance can be evaluated under (sweetener, emulsifier, antioxidant, humectant…), grouped into food additives, flavouring
• jecfa_by_number — Resolve a FEMA number or a JECFA substance number to its evaluated substance. These identifiers appear in flavouring literature and JECFA meeting reports. For INS/E-numbers use jecfa_search instead.
• jecfa_recent_evaluations — Show the substances most recently added or re-evaluated by JECFA, with their current ADI and functional class. Use to check what the committee has looked at lately rather than to look up a known subst