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Food Safety Risk Assessment - Online

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Course Description

This is the original flagship course of the JIFSAN food safety risk analysis curriculum. Food Safety Risk Assessment predicts the likelihood of harm resulting from exposure to chemical, microbial and physical agents in the diet. Our 7-week online course introduces the range of risk assessment approaches across a wide spectrum of food safety hazards, providing hands-on experience with both qualitative and quantitative techniques.

It is strongly recommended that this course be taken after you have completed the Overview of Risk Analysis or our Online Food Safety Risk Management course. Both of these courses provide contextual information about risk analysis that is not repeated here.

Overview of Topics

Context of Food Safety Risk Assessment

  • Historical Development
  • Tolerable Risk
  • International Food Safety
  • Communication with Decision Makers
  • Formal Definitions

The Risk Assessor’s Toolbox

  • Screening and Ranking Tools
  • Generic Processes
  • Probabilistic Scenario Analysis
  • Bayesian Methods
  • Red Book Paradigm
  • Monte Carlo Analysis

Applications

  • Food Additives
  • Microbial Risks
  • Food Security
  • Biotechnology
  • Food Contaminants

Components

  • Dealing with Variability and Uncertainty
  • Hazard Identification
  • Dose-response
  • Risk Characterization
  • Common Probability Distributions

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the fundamental reasons for doing risk analysis
  • Identify key developments in the role of risk assessment in international food safety
  • Define what screening and ranking tools are
  • Rank a list of pathogens
  • Demonstrate familiarity with the wide range of formal definitions of risk assessment and list the steps of the Codex risk assessment definition
  • Build a simple event tree
  • Differentiate variability and uncertainty in risk assessment
  • List and discuss the steps in the basic approach to food safety assessment
  • List and define the steps of the Red Book paradigm
  • Identify at least three kinds of uncertainty that can be present in a risk assessment
  • Discuss the significance of uncertainty and variability to the risk assessor
  • Discuss the significance of uncertainty and variability to the risk manager
  • Discuss the role of probability in quantitative risk assessment
  • Identify several of the more frequently used probability distributions in risk assessment
  • Describe the differences between chemical and microbial risk assessment
  • Identify aspects of bioterrorist risk assessment that distinguishes it from other risk assessments
  • Outline the conduct of a whole food risk assessment

This course meets a requirement of the JIFSAN Core Certificate in Food Safety Risk Analysis