A quantitative microbiological risk assessment of Campylobacter in the broiler meat chain

The model produced evaluates quantitatively the effect of interventions on the risk of campylobacteriosis from broiler meat in EU Member States (MS).The model uses many of the same principles of previous food safety risk assessment models, but takes a different mathematical approach to achieve its results. This provides the ability to investigate the effect of different combinations of interventions extremely quickly. It characterizes the variability of the level of contamination by the normalized central moments (mean, variance, skweness and kurtosis) of the log10 numbers and evaluates the effects of processing, interventions etc. by combining the raw moments of variables in the model using analytical mathematical equations. The model is normalized to current observations throughout the farm to-fork continuum. The output is the change in the human incidence rate of campylobacteriosis, rather than the actual incidence rates before and after variations in the interventions applied. The advantage of this approach is that the model’s outputs are less sensitive to any assumptions or statistical uncertainty in parameter estimates, leading to more robust quantitative results