Ensuring food safety around the globe: the many roles of risk analysis from risk ranking to microbial risk assessment.

Over the past 10 years, risk analysis has begun to play an increasingly prominent role in food safety policy around the world. In 2002, the European Union established the European Food Safety Agency to conduct risk assessment and provide scientific analysis for the European Commission (EC) and national food safety agencies throughout Europe. Individual European countries have established similar institutes, such as the RIVM Centre for Substances and Integrated Risk Assessment in the Netherlands and Germany’s Federal Risk Assessment Institute. In the U.S., scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Nutrition helped pioneer development of microbial risk assessment and office of public health science.1 The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of Public Health Science is developing risk criteria to guide its meat inspection activities.2 Many countries, including New Zealand, Australia and Japan consider risk factors in managing inspection of food imports.3 This growth in the role of risk analysis has been driven in part by growth in international trade in foods and adoption of the Sanitary and PhytoSanitary (SPS) Agreement during the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations in the mid-1990s. A central concern of the SPS negotiations was ensuring that national health and safety regulations serve their intended purpose and preventing governments from using them to impede trade protecting their domestic industries from foreign competition. For example, the U.S. claimed that the European Union’s ban on beef raised with artificial hormones was not based on science and was, in fact, an attempt to keep U.S. beef out of Europe to protect European beef producers.4 The SPS Agreement attempts to reduce such disputes by creating a safe harbor. National food safety standards that are consistent with those set out in the Codex Alimentarius are presumed to serve legitimate heal and safety purposes. Nations may adopt other standards as long as they are necessary to protect human life and health and are supported by risk assessments conducted using techniques developed by relevant international organizations.5 The Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) was established in 1963 by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO). Its founders saw its purpose as protecting human health, ensuring fair trade practices and promoting coordination of international organizations’ work on food standards. Codex committees work to develop food standards, guidelines, and codes of practice for use by national governments and international organizations. Almost all nations in the world participate in Codex committees. While this may seem very “top down,” because Codex procedures embody a commitment to making decisions by consensus, there is significant interplay between developments at the national level and work within the Codex committees. Perhaps the most important contribution of Codex has been providing a sustained, international forum for discussion of food safety issues where technical experts from around the world meet and discuss problems and best practices. Consumer groups have expressed concerns that the Codex process may result in harmonization downward of standards around the world toward less protective practices.6 If this is not the case, a significant part of the explanation likely lies in the way professional interaction fostered by work on Codex Committees has encouraged scientists and technical experts around to the world to push each other forward. Codex has played a central role in fostering and shaping the use of risk analysis in food safety policy. National governments bring their experiences with risk analysis to Codex meetings. Codex provides a