Role of epidemiology in microbial risk assessment

Abstract

Microbial risk assessment (MRA) is a systematic tool to evaluate the likelihood of exposure to food-borne pathogens and the resulting impact of exposure on consumer health. In addition, MRA can be used to evaluate the public health impact of intervention or control measures designed to prevent or reduce pathogens at any or all of the steps in our complex food production system. Epidemiological studies provide useful information and data for MRA. This paper discusses the use and limitations of epidemiological data in the development and validation of MRA using examples from published microbial risk assessments.

Controlling Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods: Working towards global scientific consensus and harmonization – Recommendations for improved prevention and control

“…In general, this method can be resource intensive, requiring extensive surveillance and laboratory personnel and cannot be applied equally as well to all pathogens (Batz et al, 2005). However, with regards to L. monocytogenes, microbial source tracking has been used effectively (Miliotis, Dennis, Buchanan, & Potter, 2008). For example, microbial source tracking has been used to initially track L. monocytogenes throughout the plant environment before developing a plantspecific intervention strategy in facilities producing smoked-fish and Latin-style cheeses (Whittam & Bergholz, 2007).…”

Combining risk assessment and epidemiological risk factors to elucidate the sources of humanE. coliO157 infection

“…Combining epidemiological data with QMRAs (e.g. to develop dose–response relationships from outbreak data) has been reported previously [33]. However, combining risk assessments for each transmission pathway to predict the total number of human cases and the subsequent comparison with the number of reported cases in order to obtain an estimate of the importance of each infection pathway has not been attempted.…”

Use of quantitative microbial risk assessment when investigating foodborne illness outbreaks: The example of a monophasic Salmonella Typhimurium 4,5,12:i:− outbreak implicating beef burgers

“…It is now well known that information gathered in epidemiological studies can provide useful data to microbial risk assessment (Delignette-Muller and Cornu, 2008;Miliotis et al, 2008). Through this example, it is illustrated that quantitative risk assessment can also be a complementary approach to epidemiological investigations especially for the assessment of missing information or the identification of the primary causes of outbreaks.…”