The international quest for an integrated approach to microbial food-borne risk prioritization: where do we stand?

This paper provides a review and evaluation of different food-risk prioritization and management frameworks that have been developed by governmental food-safety authorities, regulatory agencies and non-governmental institutions worldwide. It emphasizes the need for a new science- and risk-based system approach to microbial risk prioritization. We find that most studies and projects argue for a systematic and multi-disciplinary approach to risk prioritization but nevertheless lack it. Human and public health issues have constituted the core focus of food-risk analysis in food-borne risk prioritization studies, where the majority of studies use the concept of disease burden. Even though it is widely recognized that economic and market-level impacts of microbial hazards and preventive interventions to reduce food-borne risks are crucial to the performance of industries and markets, they are almost never accounted for in risk prioritization frameworks.