Beef production occasionally faces incidents of contamination with persistent organic pollutants (POPs; e.g. dioxins/furans) that compromise consumers’ confidence and induce social distress for farmers (Zennegg, 2018). Understanding and quantifying the POP absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) process in beef cattle is the cornerstone for handling such hazards. This remains highly challenging, as risk assessors have to cope with numerous POPs of distinct physico-chemical properties and with diverse beef farming systems (Driesen et al., 2021, Driesen et al., 2022). The aim was to set-up a generic and integrative mechanistic model for exploring the feed-to-meat accumulation and decontamination kinetics of diverse POPs in beef cattle fed contrasting diets and following different growth rate itineraries.
