Codex Alimentarius commission on ensuring food safety and promoting fair trade: harmonization of standards between Korea and codex

Korea’s overall food safety management policies reflect the Codex guidelines in terms of risk analysis and standards. Korea’s food safety management plan, which is established every 3 years, includes the pre-emptive management of risk factors and provides food safety information on the basis of scientific evidence. Since officially joining Codex as a member country in 1971, Korea has led the establishment of six Codex standards, including those for Kimchi and Gochujang. Moreover, Korea’s food standards are harmonized with Codex’s risk assessment system. This review aims to examine the current status and trends of Codex and to summarize and compare the food safety management systems and food standards between Korea and Codex.

Evaluation of Multicriteria Decision Analysis Algorithms in Food Safety: A Case Study on Emerging Zoonoses Prioritization

Decision making in food safety is a complex process that involves several criteria of different nature like the expected reduction in the number of illnesses, the potential economic or health-related cost, or even the environmental impact of a given policy or intervention. Several multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) algorithms are currently used, mostly individually, in food safety to rank different options in a multifactorial environment. However, the selection of the MCDA algorithm is a decision problem on its own because different methods calculate different rankings. The aim of this study was to compare the impact of different uncertainty sources on the rankings of MCDA problems in the context of food safety. For that purpose, a previously published data set on emerging zoonoses in the Netherlands was used to compare different MCDA algorithms: MMOORA, TOPSIS, VIKOR, WASPAS, and ELECTRE III. The rankings were calculated with and without considering uncertainty (using fuzzy sets), to assess the importance of this factor. The rankings obtained differed between algorithms, emphasizing that the selection of the MCDA method had a relevant impact in the rankings. Furthermore, considering uncertainty in the ranking had a high influence on the results. Both factors were more relevant than the weights associated with each criterion in this case study. A hierarchical clustering method was suggested to aggregate results obtained by the different algorithms. This complementary step seems to be a promising way to decrease extreme difference among algorithms and could provide a strong added value in the decision-making process.

Understanding the Relation between Establishment Food Safety Management and Salmonella Risk Factor Violations Cited during Routine Inspections

Restaurants are a frequent setting for outbreaks and sporadic cases of Salmonella. The relationship among food safety management characteristics, compliance with procedures to reduce Salmonella-associated risk factors (as found during routine inspections), and the likelihood that an establishment has experienced a sporadic Salmonella case was assessed. Individual risk factor violations associated with Salmonella transmission pathways were identified by a literature review. Data from 546 routine inspection reports collected from July 2016 to June 2017, including 25 from restaurants that had experienced a sporadic case of Salmonella, were evaluated. In restaurants with certified food managers, there were fewer observations of Salmonella risk factor reduction procedures that were not in compliance. For establishments that had experienced sporadic cases of Salmonella, the person in charge at the time of an inspection was less likely to have been the establishment's official certified food manager of record (rate ratio = 0.4, 95% confidence interval = 0.2 to 0.8; P = 0.01), and there was increased likelihood of being found out of compliance for prevention of contamination by hands (rate ratio = 3.7, 95% confidence interval = 1.4 to 8.1; P = 0.001). The results of this study warrant future research on the dynamics of food safety management systems, the effect they have on risk factor violations cited on routine inspection results, and the risk for transmission of Salmonella. Analyzing routine inspection data as hazard surveillance may be useful to identify food establishments at a greater risk for transmitting Salmonella infections.

Understanding the Relation between Establishment Food Safety Management and Risk Factor Violations Cited during Routine Inspections

Certified Food Manager (CFM) training can help ensure proper food safety practices for decreasing risk factor violations associated with foodborne illness. However, the effectiveness of food safety management also depends on the authority of the person in charge (PIC) and the added value of third-party inspectors auditing food safety policies and practices. To examine the effect of food safety management characteristics on risk factor violations cited on routine inspections, we evaluated results of 546 routine inspections in the cities of Bloomington and Richfield, MN, between 2016 and 2017. Food establishment management was characterized by the presence of a CFM of record for the establishment, whether the PIC was certified, and whether the establishment used a third-party inspector to audit food safety policies and practices. For each of these food safety management characteristics, the establishment had fewer risk factor observations that were out of compliance during routine inspections. The relationship between the establishment's food safety management characteristics and either the percentage of observations out of compliance or the inspections with observations out of compliance differed by risk factor category. For preventing contamination by hands, the lowest rates were found for inspections in which the CFM of record was the PIC. However, for potentially hazardous food time and temperature violations, establishments that used third-party inspectors had lower percentages of both observations and inspections out of compliance across all categories of management characteristics. The results of our study support the recommendations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding CFMs. However, our findings also suggest greater complexity in the characteristics of food safety management, which include the role of third-party inspectors and whether a CFM is acting in the role of the CFM of record.

Risk assessment and risk management for safe foods: Assessment needs inclusion of variability and uncertainty, management needs discrete decisions

The introduction of relevant food safety changes in legislation, like time-temperature criteria for pasteurisation and sterilisation, microbiological criteria, HACCP and FSOs, generally took several decades. All these approaches have helped to define specific targets or systems to improve the management of food safety. More and more the measures could be related to specific efficiency in public health protection. With the use of quantitative risk assessment, theoretically the effect of all interventions on the final risk can be determined, which can help to design the appropriate controls in the food safety management system. In such an assessment in practice, however results have understandably large variability and also uncertainty. There is large variability and uncertainty in the biological parts of the assessment, the dose response (infectivity, human susceptibility) the micro-organism kinetics in the chain (growth, inactivation, stress response) and also in the more technological parts, the conditions in the chain and the consumer behaviour. Often the results of risk assessments are probability distributions of the variability in illness probability, also sometimes represented with their uncertainty. To make a link from these distributions to managerial decisions, that need to be black and white, should not be considered the job of risk managers. This link needs investment from both the assessor and the manager.