ILSI Europe’s Scientific Session on Food Allergen Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) at IAFP’s European Symposium on Food Safety 2022

Munich, Germany
04/05/2022 – 06/05/2022

QRA for LinkendIn

About the Symposium
Since 2005, IAFP's European symposium has been shaping the future of food safety by providing a forum for the exchange of ideas with colleagues from across Europe working in industry, government, and academia. The Symposium is an excellent forum to gain knowledge about the latest-QRAB developments and techniques in food science and safety. The symposium will be held on  4-6 May 2022 in Munich, Germany at the Holiday Inn Munich - City Centre. For more details please visit the IAFP website.

This year ILSI Europe will participate to the Symposium through one scientific session supported by its Food Allergy Task Force. We will also have a booth in the exhibition area: Come visit us and do not hesitate to contact us to organise a one-to-one meeting, we would be very happy to meet and discuss with you.

Application of Food Allergen Risk Assessment and Management: Current Perspective and Issues
Friday, 06 May 2022, 08:30 AM (CEST)

BACKGROUND
Food allergies were recognised as a significant, global public health issue over 25 years ago with the first FAO/WHO Consultation on allergens, which identified 8 priority allergenic foods or food groups. While this recognition implied a need to manage those allergens, the available tools severely limited what could be achieved at the time. In the intervening period, several methodologies have emerged and matured, together with a better understanding of the concept of tolerable risk. These developments and activities, together with the increasing global impact of food allergies on public health led to the recently concluded FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Risk Assessment of Allergens as well as accompanying Codex activities. The landscape of food allergen management is thus at an inflection point. The previously established practice is that allergen cross-contact is managed in a binary fashion, i.e. either allergen is potentially present or not. This binary approach, which lacked industry alignment on how it was implemented, has led to inaccurate information being passed along supply chains. It has therefore led to a disconnect between the reality of risk and precautionary allergen labelling (PAL) and contributed to the proliferation of uninformative labelling. Fortunately, the current advent of allergen reference doses and their application in quantitative risk assessment can provide an opportunity to refresh how allergen risks are assessed and managed, but only if new tools are implemented consistently across businesses that produce food.

OBJECTIVES
This session presented updates from recent food allergy related activities within Codex committees and FAO/WHO joint expert consultations, explored tools and approaches to harmonize the data gathering process for food allergen risk assessments and their implementation, and investigated the impact on consumers with food allergy when differing risk management strategies for allergen labelling are implemented.

SESSION PROGRAMME
• Update on FAO/Who and Codex Activities Regarding Food Allergens, Prof. René Crevel, René Crevel Consulting Ltd, UK
• Practical Guidance on the Application of Allergen Quantitative Risk Assessment, Dr Neil Buck, General Mills Inc, CH
• Impact on Consumers with Food Allergies of Differing Public Health and Industry Risk Management Strategies, Dr Benjamin Remington, Remington Consulting Group B.V., NL

Contact
For more information on this virtual event, please contact, please contact Dr Isabelle Guelinckx, Scientific Program Director, at iguelinckx@ilsieurope.be or Ms Toula Aslanidis, Project Assistant at taslanidis@ilsieurope.be.