Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. 2012;64(2):315-323
Scientific criteria for identifying allergenic foods of public health importance (Björkstén, B., et al., 2008) have been further refined to incorporate an assessment of the strength of available scientific evidence (van Bilsen J.H. et al., 2011). A multi-disciplinary group was invited to critically test the refined approach. They independently evaluated selected publications on coconut, soy and/or peanut allergy, scored them using the newly developed level of evidence criteria, and debated proposed approaches for combining and utilising the scores to measure the overall impact of an allergen in public health impact assessments. The evaluation of selected publications using the modified criteria produced a relatively consistent result across the experts. These refined criteria were judged to be a way forward for the identification of allergenic foods of public health importance, and for prioritisation of allergen risk management and future data gathering. The debate to combine available evidence when assessing whether an allergenic food is of sufficient public health importance to warrant active management led to proposals on how to weight and combine evidence on allergen severity, potency and prevalence.
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