Prioritisation of allergenic foods with respect to public health relevance: Report from an ILSI Europe Food Allergy Task Force Expert Group.

Regulators and risk managers in general need to decide whether an allergenic food or ingredient is of such public health importance that it needs to be actively managed. There is therefore a need to scale the relative allergenicity of foods and ingredients according to the hazards they pose. Objective criteria increase transparency and trust in this decision-making process and its conclusions. This paper proposes a framework that allows categorisation and prioritisation of allergenic foods according to their public health importance. The challenge is to find a basis on which the allergenicity of foods can best be described and a method to combine the relevant measures of allergenicity into a scoring system that prioritises allergenic foods on the basis of their public health relevance. The framework is designed in accordance with the generic risk analysis principles used in food safety and can be used by regulators to decide whether or not a specific allergenic food or ingredient is of sufficient public health importance that it warrants regulation (i.e. mandatory labelling) when used in the production of food products.

Assessing and reporting uncertainties in dietary exposure analysis: Mapping of uncertainties in a tiered approach.

Uncertainty analysis is an important component of dietary exposure assessments in order to understand correctly the strength and limits of its results. Often, standard screening procedures are applied in a first step which results in conservative estimates. If through those screening procedures a potential exceedance of health-based guidance values is indicated, within the tiered approach more refined models are applied. However, the sources and types of uncertainties in deterministic and probabilistic models can vary or differ. A key objective of this work has been the mapping of different sources and types of uncertainties to better understand how to best use uncertainty analysis to generate more realistic comprehension of dietary exposure. In dietary exposure assessments, uncertainties can be introduced by knowledge gaps about the exposure scenario, parameter and the model itself. With this mapping, general and model-independent uncertainties have been identified and described, as well as those which can be introduced and influenced by the specific model during the tiered approach. This analysis identifies that there are general uncertainties common to point estimates (screening or deterministic methods) and probabilistic exposure assessment methods. To provide further clarity, general sources of uncertainty affecting many dietary exposure assessments should be separated from model-specific uncertainties.

Food processing and allergenicity.

Food processing can have many beneficial effects. However, processing may also alter the allergenic properties of food proteins. A wide variety of processing methods is available and their use depends largely on the food to be processed. In this review the impact of processing (heat and non-heat treatment) on the allergenic potential of proteins, and on the antigenic (IgG-binding) and allergenic (IgE-binding) properties of proteins has been considered. A variety of allergenic foods (peanuts, tree nuts, cows' milk, hens' eggs, soy, wheat and mustard) have been reviewed. The overall conclusion drawn is that processing does not completely abolish the allergenic potential of allergens. Currently, only fermentation and hydrolysis may have potential to reduce allergenicity to such an extent that symptoms will not be elicited, while other methods might be promising but need more data. Literature on the effect of processing on allergenic potential and the ability to induce sensitisation is scarce. This is an important issue since processing may impact on the ability of proteins to cause the acquisition of allergic sensitisation, and the subject should be a focus of future research. Also, there remains a need to develop robust and integrated methods for the risk assessment of food allergenicity.