EFSA identifies priority areas in food safety

The topics are grouped in categories: chemical, microbiological and environmental risk assessment, nutrition and a generic one of cross-cutting issues.

Methods and systems for identifying emerging food risks, common data collection/surveillance scheme across Europe, harmonisation of methods for risk assessment of chemical contaminants, improving the use of genetic data for risk assessment of microbiological contaminants and food supplements risk/benefits were some of the areas identified.

For a full list click here​ and see page six onwards.

Priority list and resource management​

An EU risk assessment agenda will define priorities in the area and identify activities and joint projects to be prioritised, programmed and resourced on which Member States and EFSA can partner, to make best use of resources.

In the first round (a more-qualitative round), key priority topics for EFSA were identified; in the second and third rounds experts were asked to rate these for importance on a number of criteria. The results would indicate a collective view of which topics were most important for EFSA.

“Analysis of results from these questionnaires shows movement towards consensus around some top-rated topic: this, along with the fact that there is overlap between risk-domains regarding several of the key topics of interest allows us to propose a reduced list of 28 topics to be taken forward for further discussion with the experts,” ​said the study.

The study came after a procurement call in 2015. It used the Delphi methodology with a three-round iterative survey and involved more than 200 scientists and experts from fields related to risk assessment in food safety.

Experts were asked to identify and rate food safety priorities according to criteria such as potential for saving resources, added value to support risk assessment activities and potential to improve harmonisation of risk assessment.

Limitations included an underrepresentation of experts from the East and only those already known to EFSA were polled.

Round by round​

In the first round, named Round 0, 206 experts were sent a survey electronically, requiring them to identify three main topics that they thought should be a focus for EFSA and 88 responded with 240 topics noted.

The second survey, Round 1, was four different questionnaires - one for each risk domain, containing specific topics related to that domain plus all topics from the generic list.

These questionnaires required the experts to rate the importance of the identified topics on three criteria (‘knowledge’, ‘public health’ and ‘harmonisation’), and to explain their choice of the most important two.

The second survey was sent to 500 experts and 165 responded, 173, when responses to the questionnaire from the Scientific Committee were added.

From this, an ‘importance’ score was calculated from ratings of the three criteria and the 10 highest scoring topics in each domain were identified for use in four more risk-domain-specific questionnaires.

Experts were again required to rate the topics on the three criteria and this time choose one as most important for EFSA to consider.

In the third round, Round 2, the 173 second-survey respondents were sent the questionnaire relevant to their expertise and 137 responded, 41 ‘chemical’ experts; 24 ‘environmental’ experts; 34 ‘microbiological’ experts and 38 ‘nutrition’ experts.