Food Safety and Health

Risk Analysis and Management

Risk estimates for food-borne infection can sometimes rely heavily on numbers of microorganisms present on the food at the time of consumption. The microorganism ecology of foods is complicated. Developing reliable risk assessments involving microorganism growth in foods would require the skills of both microbial ecologists and mathematical modelers. Simplifying assumptions can ought to be created, but due to the potential for apparently little errors in rate of growth to translate into very massive errors in the estimate of risk, the validity of these assumptions ought to be carefully assessed. Quantitative estimates of absolute microorganism risk inside narrow confidence intervals don't yet seem to be attainable. however, the expression of microorganism ecology data in "predictive microbiology" models will permit decision support using the tools of risk assessment.