PhD defence by Hernan Gomez Redondo "Towards individual-based approaches for risk assessment in food safety"

Principal supervisor:

• Senior Researcher Sara Pires, DTU

Co-supervisors:

• Senior Researcher Laurent Guillier, ANSES
• Senior Researcher Matthias Filter; BfR
• Senior Researcher Maarten Nauta, SSI

Examiners:

• Professor Tine Hald, National Food Insitute
• Professor Matthias Greiner, Germany Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, University of Hannover , Germany
• Head of Unit Moez Sanaa, World Health Organization, Switzerland

Chairperson at defence:

• Researcher Sofie Theresa Thomsen, DTU Food

A copy of the PhD thesis is available for reading at the department

Resume

According to the World Health Organization, 600 million cases of illness and 420.000 deaths were associated with 31 foodborne hazards in 2015. These estimates show that food safety continues being an important public health concern globally, and that scientific evidence to inform food safety strategies are needed. With the intention of minimizing the burden to public health that chemicals and pathogens are exposing consumers, we must understand, what are consumers exposed to, how much consumers gets exposed to and the potential damage that this can cause in our health. The results could provide evidence to establish population-specific food safety guidelines, through a more detailed description of the consumers.

This thesis described five models to estimate the risk of listeriosis (infection caused by Listeria monocytogenes), and the burden of disease of exposure to four chemicals (Methylmercury, Cadmium, Lead and inorganic Arsenic) in the French population, with the potential applicability in other countries, both European and non-European.
The risk of listeriosis is estimated based on the portion size of ready-to-eat foods and frequency of consumption, as well as the temperature of the refrigerator and the storage time before consuming the foods per individual from a National Food Survey. The data is preprocessed mimicking the data treatment approaches done when data availability is limited and used in the same listeriosis model to observe the effect of the assumptions.

With the intention of assessing the burden of disease, exposure to the four chemicals is estimated based on the individual consumption and anthropological, and the chemical concentration data. The exposure of chemicals is later used to estimate the burden from different health effects: lung, bladder and skin cancer (I-As), Fetal neurodevelopmental measured in loss of IQ points linked (MeHg), decreased intellectual function (Lead) and chronic kidney disease (Cadmium).