1st International Conference on Microbiological Risk Assessment: Program
Session goals statements:
Plenary Session:
The Plenary Session will include presentations on innovative microbial
risk assessments from around the world, critical commentary
on the state of current risk assessment practices, and a discussion
of some challenges encountered when using risk assessments
to inform domestic and international decisions. This
discourse is intended to highlight innovative strategies used
in risk assessment to resolve difficult issues in modern microbiological
risk assessments. This will include an objective analysis
of the strengths and weaknesses of current microbial risk assessment
practices.
Plenary Goals:
To provide....
· an objective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of current risk
assessment methodologies.
· an overview of some difficult issues faced by the microbial risk assessment
community and their corresponding risk managers.
· a survey of innovative solutions employed in assessments to address
challenging topics in microbial risk assessment.
Current and Future
Dimensions in Microbiological Risk Assessment:
Focus is on the application of risk assessment procedures for conducting
risk assessments on food/water borne viruses, protozoa/parasites,
prions, and toxigenic microbes. Session will define what applications
and tools are needed for conducting risk assessments on these types
of pathogens, emphasizing differences from those used in classical
bacterial risk assessments. A last group of speakers will introduce
new approaches or technologies that will enhance microbial risk
assessment capabilities for the future. Papers will define approaches
and tools that are required for these risk assessment applications
and will identify needs for additional approaches/tools to enhance
risk assessment procedures for the organism groups of concern.
Resources for Risk
Assessors:
Databases and software are important tools for risk assessors.
The goal of this session is to help both new and experienced risk
assessors become familiar with innovative database concepts as
well as various available databases and software. Overviews on
both US and international databases will be presented. Technical
presentations on future directions in risk assessment software
development will also be presented.
Interface Between
Risk Assessors and Risk Managers:
The goal of the session is to provide a better understanding
of the interface between risk assessors and risk managers
including
the functional separation, boundaries and exchanges of knowledge
between risk assessors and risk managers. This session emphasizes
the importance of the interplay between risk assessment and risk
management, and the differences in approaches to this interaction
around the globe. Presentations focus on strategies to address
routine interactions between scientists, assessors, the public,
and managers; national and international policies on the respective
roles of assessors and managers.
Modeling Intervention
Strategies for Pathogen Control:
Product pathway risk assessments are being proposed that
will estimate the risk for particular foods and calculate
the public health consequences
from changes in the process. To do this, general modeling
techniques as well as specific models for new (high pressure, pulsed
electrical fields) and existing (chlorination) food processing
operations need to be developed. Process risk assessments
must be integrated with HACCP programs and validated. This
session will present applied approaches for individual inactivation
models and their integration into complete raw material-to-consumer
process calculations.
Modeling Challenges:
This session will explore current limitations of data and models
for both exposure assessment and dose-response characterization
for microbiological agents. For exposure assessment,
considerable research and model development have occurred for
growth and thermal inactivation rate. However, modeling for
probabilistic (inconsistent) growth, lag phase durations, cross
contamination, competition with spoilage microorganisms, stochastic
modeling of extremely low probability events and strain virulence
are not sufficiently developed to adequately model microbial
behavior in risk assessments. For dose-response characterization,
the available data are insufficient to support development
of models that incorporate variability in all three factors
describing the disease triangle (host, pathogen, and environment),
or the interactions of these factors. Key issues include
susceptible sub-populations and animal-human extrapolation
for hosts, strain virulence and prevalence in foods for pathogens,
and effects of the food matrix and the intestinal ecosystem
for environment. The goal of the session is to
highlight the current status with these critical modeling needs
with the intent of stimulating additional research and model
development.
Invited speakers, panelists and talk topics:
July 24, 2002: Plenary session
Lester Crawford-keynote
Greg Paoli (Decisionalysis Risk Consultants, Inc.) Lessons
learned and future directions.
David Vose (David Vose Consultancy) Use of microbiological
risk assessment world wide in decision making.
Bjarke Bak Christensen and Helle Sommer (Danish Veterinary
and Food Administration) Campylobacter risk assessment in
poultry.
Ian Gardner (University of California Davis) Microbiological
risk assessment from an epidemiological perspective.
Suzanne vanGerwen (Unilever Research and Development Vlaardingen)-
Industry perspective on microbiological risk assessment.
Barbara Peterson (Novigen Sciences, Inc.) Strengths and
weaknesses of using food consumption data for microbiological risk
assessment.
Gregg Claycamp (Center for Veterinary Medicine, FDA) Modeling
indirect transfer of antimicrobial resistance from non-pathogenic
bacteria.
Eric Ebel (Food Safety Inspection Service, USDA) USDA's E.
coli O157:H7 in ground beef risk assessment.
Jean-Louis Jouve (Food and Agricultural Organization) Luncheon
Keynote- Microbiological risk assessment in developing countries.
Concurrent sessions July 25 and 26, 2002:
Jørgen Schlundt (World Health Organization) Luncheon
Keynote- Pulling the World together: Lessons and future directions
for international microbial risk assessment.
Kaye Wachsmuth-Closing Plenary
Resources for Risk
Assessors:
This session will help both new and experienced risk assessors
become familiar with innovative database concepts as well as various
available databases.
Fumiko Kasuga (National Institute of Infectious Diseases,
Japan) Archiving of food sampled from restaurants and carerers.
Jozsef Baranyi and Mark Tamplin (Institute of Food
Research, UK and Agricultural Research Service, USDA) COMBASE-A
combined database of microbial responses to the food environment.
Edward Gillin (Food and Agricultural Organization) FAOSTAT-Multilingual
databases of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Panel-Database uses for risk assessment:
Sara Fein (Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
FDA)
Alanna Moshfegh (USDA)
Cliff Johnson (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Current and Future
Dimensions in Microbiological Risk Assessment:
This session will present new approaches, technologies, and software
that will enhance capabilities for conducting risk assessments
on food/water borne viruses, protozoa/parasites, prions, and toxigenic
microbes.
Mark Sobsey (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Rotavirus, Enterovirus, and Calicivirus Risk Assessment Approaches
and Models.
Peter Teunis (National Inst. Public Health and the Environment,
Netherlands) Modeling infectivity of Cryptosporidium
Xiumei Liu (Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine) Microbiological
risk assessment in China:current situation and challenges.
Norman Pace (University of Colorado) Microbial ecology.
Cynthia Chappell (University of Texas-Houston) Human and
animal dose-response models for Cryptosporidium.
Josh Cohen (Harvard University)-The use of a computer simulation
to assess the risk of BSE spreading if it were introduced into
the United States.
Kenneth Kornman (Interleukin Genetics, Inc.) Genomics and
immuno-inflammatory responses to microbial pathogens; new directions
in host characterization.
Trudy Wassenaar (Molecular Microbiology and Genomics Consultants,
Germany) Virulence prediction from genome sequences, promises and
dreams.
Panel-Future of Software:
Douglas Crawford Brown (University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill) and TBA
Interface Between
Risk Assessors and Risk Managers:
This session will provide a better understanding of the interface
between risk assessors and risk managers.
Arpad Somogyi (Directorate General, Health and Consumer
Protection, EC)Interactions between risk assessors and risk managers
in the European Union Food Safety Authority.
Anna Lammerding (Health Canada) An International framework
for the interaction between assessors and managers of microbiological
hazards.
Robert Buchanan (Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
FDA) Lessons learned in initiating and conducting risk assessments
within a risk analysis framework: a U.S. approach.
Panel-Real world experiences:
Kim Thompson (Harvard)and session speakers
Modeling Intervention
Strategies for Pathogen Control:
This session will present applied approaches for individual inactivation
models and their integration into complete raw material-to-consumer
process calculations.
Gustavo Barbosa-Canova (Washington State University) Modeling
New Food Processes for Microbial Inactivation.
Frank Devlieghere (Ghent University) Modeling of chemical
inhibition and inactivation.
Michiel van Schothorst (Nestlé) Linking risk assessment
and HACCP.
Jan van Impe (Katholeike Universiteit Leuven) Modeling dynamic
conditions.
Modeling Challenges:
This session will explore current limitations of data and models
for both exposure assessment and dose-response characterization
for microbiological agents.
Marion Wooldridge (Veterinary Laboratory Administration,
UK) Data Quality, combining multiple data sources and distribution
fitting.
Stanley Kaplan (Food Safety Inspection Service, USDA) Application
of Bayes' Theorem to microbiological risk assessment.
Donald Schaffner (Rutgers) Modeling cross-contamination.
Maarten Nauta (National Inst. Public Health and the Environment,
Netherlands) Integrating probabilistic and kinetic models and modeling
competition spoilage flora.
Panel- Dose-response modeling, issues in hazard characterization,
and modeling susceptible populations:
Arie Havelaar (National Inst. Public Health and the Environment,
Netherlands) Modeling the interactions between agent, host and
the environment.
Joe Eisenberg (U. of Cal. Berkeley)
Chuck Haas (Drexel University)
