Abstract
Substantial progress has been made in characterising the risk associated with exposure to allergens in food. However, absence of agreement on what risk is tolerable has made it difficult to set quantitative limits to manage that risk and protect allergic consumers effectively. This paper reviews scientific progress in the area and the diverse status of allergen management approaches and lack of common standards across different jurisdictions, including within the EU. This lack of regulation largely explains why allergic consumers find Precautionary Allergen Labelling confusing and cannot rely on it. We reviewed approaches to setting quantitative limits for a broad range of food safety hazards to identify the reasoning leading to their adoption. This revealed a diversity of approaches from pragmatic to risk-based, but we could not find clear evidence of the process leading to the decision on risk acceptability. We propose a framework built around the criteria suggested by Murphy and Gardoni (2008) for approaches to defining tolerable risks. Applying these criteria to food allergy, we concluded that sufficient knowledge exists to implement the framework, including sufficient expertise across the whole range of stakeholders to allow opinions to be heard and respected, and a consensus to be achieved.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to describe the current situation in the management of unintended allergen presence
All these aspects could be evaluated in the context of a capabilities-based derivation of tolerable risk proposed by Murphy and Gardoni (2008), the extent to which a risk degrades the ability of individuals to lead the kind of life they have reason to value
We have reviewed the factors contributing to tolerable risk decisions and how they were made for a diverse range of other foodborne hazards
Summary
The aim of this paper is to describe the current situation in the management of unintended allergen presence. This idea was quite revolutionary at the time, it was clear that if population thresholds derived using this approach were to try and achieve zero risk in all allergic individuals, the levels would most likely be so low for most allergens that they would not be practical for most applications and result in an abundance of precautionary allergen labelling (PAL), a voluntary approach to inform allergic consumers of the unintended presence of a food allergen This was followed by a paper by (Crevel et al, 2007) who discussed the concept of modelling such data to determine the amounts of total allergenic protein – called eliciting dose (ED) – at which a certain percentage of the allergic population would be predicted to experience allergic symptoms (EDx at which x% is expected to respond).
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