Any entity, with a responsibility for food safety from national food safety authorities to food producers and processers, needs to deal with numerous food safety issues, often simultaneously, and with limited resources.  Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to rank and prioritize food safety efforts in a structured and scientific manner, so that resources can be allocated to most efficiently protect public health. In recent years, numerous approaches to rank food safety risks have been published and some have been implemented by national authorities and international organizations to better inform risk management decisions.  However, developing and implementing a risk ranking approach is still a significant challenge for many countries, particularly those with limited resources. Some of the challenges relate to the multitude of methods and tools available to rank risks, the lack of data, and the lack of expertise needed to conduct those types of efforts. This symposium aims to, directly, address this issue.  It will present and discuss a proposed approach for ranking risks in poor and low resource settings and will, also, look at selected examples of how ranking is being approached in countries where technical or financial resources, or both, are lacking.

Presentations