Search

The purpose of this study is to develop a globally valid chemical risk assessment tool that provides the user with a priority rating in terms of which chemicals are important to manage in raw materials. The process entails the use of decision trees that enable the determination of risk (or “likelihood to cause harm”), and severity using objective and transparent selection criteria. Taken together, severity and risk are positioned in an HACCP-like matrix informing on the prioritization level of each combination of chemical hazard and raw material. The proposed model is intended to be adequately protective for consumer's health, as it considers a conservative food intake scenario, as well as various sources of contaminant exposure. The model's design is flexible and can easily be adapted to the needs of different food product categories and scenarios. Case studies are presented to illustrate the feasibility of the approach, and the model was tested using several examples, the results of which are consistent with existing data in the literature.

Edible vegetable oil is a necessity in people's daily diet, and its safety has attracted the attention of the government and consumers. In recent years, the safety incidents of edible vegetable oil are reported, and the safety problems of edible vegetable oil caused by chemical hazards such as benzopyrene, heavy metal and aflatoxin B1 are more serious. In this research, a risk assessment model through dietary exposure assessment and margin of exposure (MOE) were built to assess the health risks of benzopyrene, aflatoxin B1, and heavy metals in edible vegetable oils. And then an early warning model of food oil safety risk was established by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and back propagation (BP) neural network. According to the national standards and sampling data, the risk early warning model determined eight evaluation indexes of vegetable oil quality and safety, and calculated the risk value of chemical pollution in vegetable oil by Entropy Weight-Analytic Hierarchy Process(EW-AHP). The data of eight evaluation indexes were taken as the input of the model, and the comprehensive risk value was taken as the output of the model. The model learning process was carried out, and four algorithms, namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBF) and Neural Network (BP), were selected for construction and comparison of model. The daily sampling data of chemical hazard factors in edible vegetable oil were quantified into specific chemical hazard risk levels. Thus the goal of predicting chemical hazard levels was achieved in edible vegetable oil. This study provides targeted reference suggestions for the safety supervision of edible vegetable oil, so as to improve the efficiency of supervision and ensure the consumption safety of edible vegetable oil.

Contamination of pathogens in crushed and tube ice is a public health concern in many developing countries, calling for the development of practical preventive measures to reduce microbial and chemical contamination. By applying principles of hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP), data on production and distribution processes in 11 ice-making plants in different provinces of Thailand were obtained. Results showed that producers of both ice forms lacked knowledge on water treatment and disinfection that could cause microbial contamination. Other sources of microbial contamination were from condensate in tube ice production and from dirty sacks used in ice transportation. A chemical hazard also was found in crushed ice due to chromium contamination in an anti-rusting agent.

A protocol was developed for assessing physical and chemical hazard risks in foods based on the rationale for ranking foods according to the six microbiological hazard risk characteristics developed in 1989 by the US National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods. Care was taken to preserve the six-characteristic hazard ranking system in order to provide continuity for risk assessment of all types of food hazards within the HACCP sytem. Industrial users of HACCP may now conduct a one-step combined hazard analysis using the same basic procedures and apply the results for establishment of hazard categories for microbiological, physical and chemical hazards for a specific food.