A Public Health Basis for Food Safety Objectives. Arie Havelaar, Wout Slob, and Peter Teunis, National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, P.O. Box 1, 3720 BA Bilthoven, the Netherlands, telephone +31 30 2742826, fax +31 30 2744434, e-mail Arie.Havelaar@rivm.nl
Food Safety Objectives (FSOs) are emerging as important tools for management of microbial and chemical hazards in food. The Codex Alimentarius Commission for Food Hygiene has defined FSOs as “a statement based on a risk analysis process, which expresses the level of a hazard in a food that is tolerable in relation to an appropriate level of protection”. Hence, defining FSOs explicitly requires definition of the desired level of protection (acceptable risk). There is currently not a generally accepted basis for defining acceptable risk in the context of food hygiene. We propose the use of an integrated measure of public health, the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY) as a common metric for expressing risk (i.e. a function of the probability and severity of undesirable health effects) by different agents, leading to different disease end-points. We illustrate this approach by evaluating the public health impact of exposure to genotoxic carcinogens under the current regulatory regimes, and derive an equivalent level of acceptable risk for infectious gastro-intestinal pathogenic bacteria. Using exemplary dose-response models, we then proceed to derive criteria for the maximum acceptable concentration of a carcinogenic and a pathogenic agent in food, accounting for uncertainty and variability.
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