Monday, November 11, 2024

Belgium shares the benefits of food safety barometer

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The Belgian Food Safety Barometer has shown improvements in the country over the past decade.

Its purpose is to measure food safety and enable evidence-based risk management and policy-making. It consists of 30 indicators covering various aspects of food safety from farm to fork.

It relies on data collected from the Belgian Federal Agency for Food Chain Safety (FASFC) management program and data from the National Disease Reference Center. Metrics are expressed as positive or negative changes compared to previous years and a base year to assess progress over time.

Advantages of barometer
This indicator accounts for the presence of chemical and microbial hazards, test results, food companies’ compliance with self-testing, zoonotic agents, and the number of foodborne outbreaks reported. These are weighted based on importance and expressed as a percentage. However, the weight assigned to each indicator is based on expert opinion rather than risk assessment.

This method has been used for more than 10 years and helps to demonstrate the food safety situation in Belgium to stakeholders, consumers and trading partners.

This enables trend analysis and provides insight into your food safety system. However, the dynamic nature of food chains means that flexible systems are needed to adapt to risks and incorporate new indicators.

According to FASFC, also known as AFSCA and FAVV, barometer results increased by 25.3% by 2021 compared to the base year of 2010.

Involving stakeholders representing the entire food chain was a strength in terms of participating and gaining the best knowledge, but a challenge due to the different focus on food safety risks.

FASFC said the results can be difficult to interpret. The number of food poisoning cases highlights this problem. The low number of incidents may be due to a good food safety situation, inadequate reporting systems, or external constraints such as measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a gender.

The agency also warned that inconsistent procedures could lead to biased results and impede the development of management strategies.

upcoming meetings
Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) held a workshop this week on the use of whole genome sequencing (WGS) in Peru’s water and food poisoning outbreak.

The presentation will highlight the advantages and potential disadvantages of WGS, and the discussion will focus on summarizing the state of technology adoption at the global level and the options for using WGS for food safety in Peru.

This workshop is a closed meeting to which government officials, public health professionals, researchers, and stakeholders involved in food safety, water, and foodborne illness surveillance and response are invited. A report of the event will be published in the future.

Another workshop, to be held in Bogotá, Colombia, from February 12 to 16, will focus on Campylobacter prevention and control.

This event is aimed at professionals from the PulseNet Latin America and Caribbean Network (PNALC). This is in response to an increase in Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) cases in Peru between 2018 and 2023, leading to increased genomic surveillance of Campylobacter.

On the same dates, a second conference on foodborne viruses will be held in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 2022, the Codex Alimentarius Commission sought scientific advice from the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Meeting on Microbiological Risk Assessment (JEMRA) as part of its work to update guidelines for the control of viruses in food. This document covers all foods, with a focus on ready-to-eat foods, hepatitis A, and norovirus.

FAO and WHO held their first meeting in September 2023 to address food attribution, analytical methods and indicators of viruses in food.

The second meeting will collect and evaluate recent data, evidence and scientific opinion on foodborne virus prevention and intervention measures and the effectiveness of interventions in the food chain.

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