Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to eat meat products: Risks and management

Summary

​Risk assessment of food is defined as "a process to scientifically evaluate the probability of occurrence and severity of known or potential adverse health effects resulting from human exposure to food-borne hazards".

There are basically two types of risk assessment – qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative risk assessments estimate the risk of illness or death from a particular hazard as Low, Medium or High.

Quantitative Risk Assessments - QRAs - give numerical estimates of risk eg: the hazard is likely to cause one death from every one billion servings.

To give a realistic estimate QRAs require a tremendous amount of data gathering. Then the data need skilful handling by risk modellers plus inputs from industry experts.

Risk assessment is a team exercise which requires significant resources.

The USA assessment team which delivered the QRA of L. monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods, for example, lists more than 20 people, arranged in four teams and worked for more than four years.

While the present QRA of L. monocytogenes in processed meats had a much leaner team, all the major authors are members of the FAO/WHO roster of experts on risk assessment and on the team which drafted the FAO/WHO risk assessment on L. monocytogenes in RTE foods.

The FAO/WHO and the Australian processed meats risk assessments overlapped and the latter benefited greatly from the work which the international team did for FAO/WHO. As well, the team received great input from the smallgoods industry which provided information on products, processes and contamination with L. monocytogenes.

The present QRA is therefore a state-of-the-art tool to help all stakeholders to understand:

the risk of listeriosis from certain smallgoods
where the risks come from
what can be done to reduce them
Properly used, QRAs can be used to measure industry improvement and it will be a straightforward task to follow the risk reduction strategies modelled in the present assessment.

This summary of the QRA is in three parts:

Listeriosis and our exposure to it
Estimates of the risk of contracting listeriosis from RTE meats
Estimates of risk reductions strategies