Developing model of risk-based sanitary-epidemiological control (surveillance) over food products in consumer market

Abstract

The relevance of this study arises from products being fixed as an independent object for state sanitary-epidemiological control in law. The contemporary stage of the public regulation involves the following: administrative pressure on economic entities ought to be easer but the best possible protection of citizens’ life and health should be provided. In this study, our aim was to test approaches to developing the risk-based model for control of food products on the consumer market in the country. The study relied on using the fundamental methodical approaches to the risk-based control model used by the Sanitary Service of Russia. A potential health risk was determined as a combination of likely violations of legal requirements to a certain product, severity of health outcomes due to such violations, and coefficients that described a scale of undesirable consequences. Food products were assigned into one of the following categories as per health risks: objects of extremely high risk, high risk, considerable risk, moderate risk, medium risk, or low risk. We suggest a fundamental scheme describing how to organize risk-based control of food products as an independent control object. It includes several basic elements, namely, creating a register of consumer food products; identifying priority groups of food products as per risk criteria at the federal level; identifying regional priorities. We provide substantiation for advisability of profound risk assessment performed for food products in each group considering specific frequency of sanitary violations, scales in which a certain food product in consumed in different regions, and priority consumer demands. Our suggestion is to integrate risk profiles of products and risk-based laboratory support for control into the general model. We’d like to highlight the relevance of creating a unified database to keep the results of all the control and surveillance activities including data obtained by laboratory tests of products bound to manufacturers, distributors, and sellers. It is also quite relevant to include algorithms and mathematical methods of science-intensive analysis of the data sets into software modules of the Rospotrebnadzor’s Unified Information System.

Keywords

• food products
• control
• safety
• risk-based model
• risk profile
• register of products
• violations of mandatory requirements
• laboratory control optimization