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1. RFF President Paul Portney welcomes visitors to the Food Safety Research Consortium briefing. Audio | Transcript

2. Michael R. Taylor describes the purpose of the briefing, how the FSRC was initiated, and its goals.
   Audio | Transcript

3. Catherine E. Woteki discusses the FSRC’s operating principles and organizational structure. Audio | Transcript

4. Michael P. Doyle highlights the unique nature of the Consortium’s interdisciplinary collaboration and puts into context the role that the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety will have in the FSRC.
   Audio | Transcript

5. J. Glenn Morris describes the initial FSRC project, a model to rank the public health risks associated with foodborne pathogens.
   Audio | Transcript

6. Questions and Answers about the Food Safety Research Consortium.
   Audio | Transcript

Good afternoon and welcome. I am Mike Taylor. We’re so pleased to see all of you here. Before we get into the substance of the announcement and the discussion of the activities, I’d like to ask Paul Portney, who is the president of Resources for the Future (RFF), to make some brief welcoming remarks.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part I

Audio

Mike, thank you very much. I’m Paul Portney and I’m very pleased to be able to welcome you here and to thank you all for being here. As you will soon hear, RFF is but one part of a consortium of organizations created to look at problems associated with food safety in the U.S., and we’re honored to be part of that consortium. Because the announcement gives us the home court advantage, at least with respect to this kickoff announcement, I’m pleased to be able to have you all here.

Sixteen years ago, here at RFF, Resources for the Future created the Center for Risk Management, which over the past decade and a half has morphed into one of our three research divisions, now called the Risk Resource and Environmental Management Division. As the first director of that Center for Risk Management in 1987, I had a number of aspirations for the work that RFF would do, both here and in conjunction with other top-notch research organizations.

One of the first things that I wanted this new center to do was to contribute high-quality independent research that would help regulatory agencies in the U.S.—at the federal, state, and local level—make research-based decisions about pressing environmental risk problems. Specifically, I was hoping that we could help prioritize the panoply of risks that regulatory agencies everywhere faced.

A second goal for this Center for Risk Management, when it was created, was to think about the problems of conflicting regulatory authorities across regulatory agencies. A third, as I mentioned, was to talk about risk prioritization. You will soon be hearing from Mike Taylor and his colleagues in this food safety consortium. But I’m pleased to say that after all of this time, and as RFF’s research related to risk begins to move beyond things like environmental risk management and the risks associated with highway safety regulations, into the food safety area, and possibly one day into areas related to occupational safety and health, that among the very first initiatives of this new food safety consortium is a risk prioritization project. And to say, also, that over the years, I’m sure they will turn their attention to fragmented regulatory authority across other regulatory agencies and other problems that we anticipated being of use to the nation, related to risk management in 1987, when RFF formally kicked off its work in risk management.

So without further ado, I’m going to turn the floor over to Mike Taylor and his colleagues, who are an integral part of this consortium. Again, thank you all for being here, and I hope that over the years you will both pay attention to and also contribute to the research and policy analytic work that this important new consortium will be doing. Thanks so much.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part II

Michael TAYLOR, Senior Fellow and Director, Risk, Resource, and Environmental Management Division, Resources for the Future, describes the purpose of the briefing, how the FSRC was initiated, and its goals.

Audio

Thanks, Paul, and again, welcome. We could not be more pleased to see this group of folks in the room here. We really have three purposes today. We want to announce the formation of the Food Safety Research Consortium (FSRC) and announce its initial research project, which is a risk-ranking model development project. Equally, if not more importantly, we really want to begin the dialogue. We want to answer your questions, find out what your questions and perspectives are about what we’re doing, and really send the message, very clearly, that this consortium is not just about collaboration among the six research institutions who have formed it, but with the community broadly, which this group in the room today represents extremely well. Again, we’re so pleased you’re here.

I’m pleased, of course, to be joined as a panelist this afternoon by three colleagues from the consortium, each of whom is representing their university as a member of the steering committee for the consortium: Dr. Cathy Woteki, of the Institute for Food Safety and Security at Iowa State University; Professor Mike Doyle from the University of Georgia, the Center for Food Safety; and Dr. Glenn Morris from the Department of Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine at the University of Maryland medical school. You have packets that have in them, among other things, fairly complete biographies of the folks who are at the table here, and also other folks participating in the consortium, so I won’t take the time for lengthy introductions. You also have in your packet the press release that we’ve issued announcing the consortium, and backgrounders that are an attempt to summarize succinctly what we’re doing, so if those spawn questions, again, there’ll be a chance to ask those in a few minutes.

The format today is for the four of us to make extremely brief comments. We’ve told ourselves five to six minutes. Feel free to shuffle in your seat if you feel that we’re going over, which some of us have a tendency to do. The whole purpose is to save time for your questions and comments, and we will certainly do that. When that time comes, I would ask you to use the microphone. There’s an audio recording being made so we can collect the information that flows here, so it would help for that purpose if you came to the microphone.

The FSRC really flows from a food safety priority-setting conference that RFF convened back in May of 2001—and I know a number of you here participated—but also from subsequent discussion among the six institutions, and really consultations with a wide range of experts and stakeholders, [including the] government and academic community, industry, and the public interest consumer community.

The aspiration that underlies the consortium—and this is one that I think many share—is for a more science- and risk-based food safety system. Now this term is easy to say and you hear it frequently, and it’s a term that means more than one thing inherently, and it may mean different things to different people. One thing it means to us, to those of us who have formed this consortium, is making the best use of public and private resources to reduce food-borne illness. A system that does that, we think, would have many benefits for public health, first of all, but also for public confidence in the food system, the safety of food, as well as the ability of the United States to continue to be a food safety leader, both domestically and internationally.

Now, it’s easy to say, “Let’s have a more science- and risk-based food safety system.” It’s easy to say we want that, but it’s very difficult to do, and I think, for many reasons, again, that people in this room are conversant with. One of the reasons it’s hard is that we do lack some of the basic analytical and decision tools that are required to design and implement such a system. Examples include the fact that even with the recent progress in risk assessment and improvement in epidemiological data on food-borne illness, we lack agreed-upon methods for comparing and ranking the public health impact of specific food-borne hazards, such as specific pathogen-food combinations. We also lack a well-defined framework for prioritizing opportunities to reduce the risk of illness, taking into account, of course, the magnitude of the risk—one of the most important problems—but also the feasibility, the cost, and the effectiveness of the full range of farm-to-table intervention options.

Without these tools, it’s difficult to know, and it’s difficult to demonstrate, how public resources for research, regulation, and education can best be deployed. The goal of the FSRC is to develop these tools and to do that through a program of multidisciplinary and multiinstitutional research, as Dr. Woteki and Dr. Doyle will discuss in a minute.

In addition to the three institutions represented on the panel—University of Maryland, Iowa State, and the University of Georgia—the consortium also includes Dr. Julie Caswell of the University of Massachusetts, who as you know is a leading food safety economist representing the Food Marketing Policy Center; and Dr. Jerry Gillespie at University of California–Davis, representing the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security. They, unfortunately, could not be with us today. They will be participating in the first meeting of the consortium steering committee and expert panel next week.

We look forward to collaborating with other institutions and researchers. The consortium is not a closed entity, and we are completely open to collaboration of any form, including expansion of the consortium as time goes by, as research institutions are interested in considering that. To help guide the research of the consortium, we’ve also assembled a panel of experts who will bring another diverse array of expertise and experience to our task. We look forward not only to their role as a sounding board for us, but also possibly collaborating on specific projects. These include Dr. Richard Guerrant at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Dr. Sandy Miller at the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at Virginia Tech, Richard Merrill at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Law—no, this is not a UVA alumni society—and Dr. Joseph Rodricks of Environ Corporation, who is, of course, prominent in chemical risk assessment.

In addition to introducing the consortium, which Mike and Cathy will do in more detail in a minute, we’re also obviously very pleased to be announcing the consortium’s first research project, which has been made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This project, as I mentioned, involves the development of a model for comparing and ranking the public health impact of specific pathogen-food combinations, and Dr. Morris will describe this project in more detail in just a minute.

As you’ll see today, I hope it will be very clear that this consortium effort is about research to develop tools and find practical ways to improve how the food safety system works to reduce risk. We’re all familiar with the policy issues and the legislative debates surrounding food safety, and many of the people in this room, as well as at the table, have been involved in these debates and have well-known and diverse views on the issues. We, within the consortium, embrace our diversity and we certainly enjoy the debate, but we put those debates aside for the purpose of the consortium. We believe that the kind of research and tool development work we plan to do will be relevant and necessary, regardless of what—if anything—happens in the legislative sphere.

I’d also like to emphasize that we want to develop tools that will be of practical value to our food safety regulators and policymakers who are working every day to reduce food-borne illness on the basis of the best available science and the resources at their disposal. Based on the experience that all of us have had, I think we have an understanding of how difficult the task that the regulatory agencies are carrying out can be. Our success will come from producing tools that they can use to make the system work better. That really, in the end, is our goal.

One more announcement that perhaps will be taken for granted, but nevertheless, I was pleased when I saw it yesterday. We’re unveiling today a Web page for the FSRC, which you can find at www.rff.org/fsrc. There’s a piece of paper in your packet that I think gives you that information.

Finally, I’d like to just thank two institutions that really have been instrumental in getting this effort off the ground. The first is the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, which has worked with us on the development of the consortium concept. They supported the development of a background paper that we will publish this spring as a Milbank report and their help has been very important.

Also, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for its really critical support of our first research project. I’d like to acknowledge the presence of Dr. Pamela Russo, who’s a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who’s overseeing our grant. She’s here and would be happy to answer questions about the foundation’s interest in food safety. To us, though, it’s a critically significant thing that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has supported this project. It’s really their first significant venture in the food safety sphere. I think it’s an important sign to all of us who are interested in food safety that it’s very much on the radar screen of the nation’s number-one health foundation, and we’re very pleased to be part of that first venture.

With that, thank you again for being here, and I’d like to ask Cathy to take the podium.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part III

Audio

Thank you, Mike, and thanks to all of you who’ve come this afternoon to hear about this new consortium and to begin what we hope is going to be an ongoing dialogue about our food safety system.

My task is to describe to you how we’re proposing to go about undertaking this work. Mike, in his opening comments, talked with you about our goal, and I’d just like to reiterate that. Our goal in establishing the FSRC is to conduct and encourage multidisciplinary research that will lead to the development of research-based management tools, for use both by the public as well as the private sectors, and ultimately by improving how the food safety system works to reduce the burden of food-borne illness.

The FSRC is a vehicle for research collaboration among individual investigators at the founding member institutions. Over time, we anticipate and, in fact, we’re actively going to be soliciting other institutions to join the consortium. We hope that for those of you in the audience who are interested in joining us, we would certainly welcome your inquiries.

The consortium has adopted some operating principles, and I’d like to review those with you. First of all, we are an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research collaboration that exists to develop and disseminate knowledge and decision tools. The consortium is not going to take positions on public policy issues or to engage in lobbying. The work of the consortium is inherently interdisciplinary and will require the efforts of experts in the natural sciences and in the social sciences, from many institutions. The consortium is going to seek the widest possible collaborations on the specific projects that we undertake.

The consortium also intends that the work products that we produce be of some practical value to government and to the private sector, and particularly to those who are making program and policy decisions in government and in the private sector. To achieve this, the consortium is going to seek, and very much value, dialogue and collaboration with officials and experts.

The consortium projects can be undertaken by the consortium as a whole, by two or more of the participating institutions, by individual participants in the member organizations, working with individuals and institutions outside of the consortium. The participation by the different organizations and universities in the consortium doesn’t limit us, in any way, from pursuing our own food safety research that may be funded by other organizations.

A key component of every one of the research or tool development projects that we’ll be undertaking will be a process. That process is going to include meetings, workshops, and consensus conferences, and other means for enhancing participation in a way that we can solicit views from interested experts and stakeholders. The consortium will also convene forums to disseminate the information arising from our projects and also to solicit comment on those. The results of the consortium studies will be published in the scholarly literature, and we’d also plan to publish in forums that are more accessible to nontechnical audiences.

Funding for our studies will be sought from private foundations and from public institutions funding food safety research. Studies will be managed in accordance with established policies of the funding institutions and also of the institutions participating in specific projects.

We have a steering committee, as Mike Taylor told you about. Members of that steering committee are the participants speaking to you today. We regret that two of our members could not be here, but Camala Lyon is here representing the University of California in Jerry Gillespie’s absence.

Also, to help guide our program, we have an expert panel, and Mike Taylor provided you with a list of the members of that expert panel. Our expectations are that this panel is going to provide us advice on the directions that we’re proposing to take. It’s going to provide an external review for us, and some expert advice on specific projects as we move along.

I’d also like to introduce to you our executive director, who is Margaret Glavin. She’s a visiting scholar at RFF, and Ms. Glavin is going to provide leadership in developing the collaborative relationships with other institutions, as well as with the food system stakeholders, and is going to work closely with the steering committee and the expert panel to help in planning and coordinating the different projects that we undertake. She’s going to be assisted by Ms. Jody Tick. Jody is our program manager, and she’s going to provide the organizational day-to-day support for the consortium.

The package of materials that you picked up contains a document that’s called a backgrounder, and that provides you with some additional information about how this entity is going to operate. We believe that the proposed structure and the broad range of expertise and skills contributed by the participating institutions are going to provide us with flexibility as well as access to all the different types of disciplinary expertise that are needed to address the question of how to move to a more science- and risk-based food safety system that will lower the burden of food-borne illness and improve public health.

I’d like to add my own thanks to Mike’s for your participation this afternoon, and I look very much forward to the beginning of what we hope is going to be an ongoing dialogue. Next, I would like to introduce Mike Doyle.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part IV

Audio

Good afternoon. What I’m going to do is provide my perspective of why we need and want to go forward with this FSRC. And I’m going to, in essence, address three points. One question that has been asked of me since the idea of this consortium came about is, “Why do we need this consortium?” Secondly, “What’s unique about this food safety consortium that makes it different from all these other food safety alliances and consortia that have already been formed?” Last but not least, “What will be the role of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety within the consortium?”

From my perspective—and this is strictly my perspective, I’m not speaking for all my colleagues on the consortium—I have an overriding principle here. And that is, “What can be done with the resources that are available that will have the greatest impact on improving public health through food safety?”

To address this, what I believe is needed is a well-founded, science-based approach—and when I say “science,” this also includes the social sciences—that will provide the decisionmakers with the tools and the information that’s needed to assist them in making the best decisions that they can have, in providing the greatest impact on improving public health through food safety.

There’s a large number—a very complex issue—a large number of food safety issues that we have to deal with today. Much more than we’ve ever had before. If you look back about two decades ago, there are about 10 food-borne bacterial pathogens that were on the list. Today we’ve got more than 30, and the list continues to grow. Unfortunately, the resources that are available at all levels to address food safety issues are limited, and so we need a more organized, well-founded, science-based approach to identify what issues deserve to have more emphasis than others, so that we can have the greatest impact on improving public health. Overall, there are just insufficient resources to enable regulators and public health decisionmakers to address all of these issues, both in depth and effectively.

This is going to be a formidable task in terms of identifying which hazards should receive greater emphasis than the others, and it’s going to require the input of a variety of experts from a variety of disciplines. This is why I believe that the FSRC is very unique, in that it is not only going to include food microbiologists, food toxicologists, and food scientists, but also we’ve got economists, political scientists, infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, veterinarians, risk assessors, statisticians, and we’ll even throw in a few molecular biologists. In the end, this is what I perceive as being a very diverse and appropriately constructed group that is in a great position to address what I perceive as being the overriding principle.

In terms of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety, we’re truly delighted to be a member and a participant in the FSRC. As our expertise is largely in the area of food microbiology, we try to come up with creative ways to reduce risk of food-borne pathogens, and their dissemination, through detection and control strategies, all the way from the farm to the home.

So in the end, it is my goal to provide well-founded, science-based tools and information to enable decisionmakers to make well-informed decisions in making major improvements to public health through safer foods.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part V

Audio

I get to bring up the rear here and actually talk a little bit about what this really translates into. Everybody talks about science-based policy. Everybody’s in favor of it. It’s like motherhood and apple pie. The real question is, “How do you do it? How do you really translate this science-based policy concept into something that is accessible and usable by people who are involved in food safety?”

What this does is lead to the concept of decision tools. And I’ll have to admit, the first time Mike mentioned “decision tool” to me, I thought, “What the hell is that?” What a decision tool is, is an approach, a methodology, and at very concrete level, something that a policymaker can use—or that somebody who is directly involved in the food industry, or people who are interested in food safety can use—to begin to get an understanding of the complexity of the food system. We are dealing with an incredibly complex system, and in trying to assess the public health impact of various interventions and of approaches to food safety, it’s such a big system that it’s hard to get your hands on it.

If you try to use an intuitive approach, which is what all of us have always done in the past, frequently your intuition fails you because it’s simply too complex. This is where you need to begin to have tools, and this is what we’re talking about: to begin to develop methodologies that cut across multiple disciplines, and that are accessible to people, that they can use to really try to come grips with the public health impact of food safety.

So how do you do it? We have here—it was on the table out front—the front piece from the beta version of our initial food safety risk-ranking model. At a very concrete level, we’re really doing this. I would emphasize that this is a first pass. This is, if you will, a pilot. We’re trying to put together a computer modeling system—these days, if you’re going to model anything, it has to be on a computer—to put together a computer modeling system that is accessible, that is usable, and again, that is something that people will use as a basis for beginning to understand the basic elements of food safety and the role that they play in terms of promoting food safety.

Just a few technical words, and again, for those who are interested, Mike Batz is sitting in the front row—he actually put most of this program together. He and I will be happy talk to people afterward, but basically, it’s based on a platform called Analytica, which is very attractive because it permits us to look at degrees of uncertainty and the confidence intervals around the estimates that we put into the model. Feeding into the model are data from a number of different sources.

Reported pathogen incidence data—basically, these are Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. Food net data—and again, we’ve been working very closely with CDC to optimize the data flows that are coming in for those areas. Disease symptom data—which again plays importantly into the economic analysis to understand not only what types of symptomatology people have, how long their illnesses last, but also whether they’re chronic long-term sequelae, such as Guillain Barré, chronic arthritis, chronic diarrhea, or what. Food attribution data—absolutely critical, particularly from a food safety standpoint. You don’t regulate, usually, by pathogen. You regulate by food. You need to be able to say, “What are the potential gains in terms of public health that come with doing something in terms of chicken processing?”

Consequently, you need to have the ability to look at things from the standpoint of a specific food, as well as from the standpoint of a pathogen, which gets into this whole concept of food-pathogen combinations and the ability to do attributable risks. We were down at CDC a week and a half ago and spent a lot of time with them talking about this, and this is something they’re very concerned about—the ability to actually identify which foods are the critical vehicles in terms of development of illness.

Finally, overlaid on all of this is the economic analysis component: to really be able to go beyond simple numbers of cases or hospitalizations or deaths; to really be able to look at—again, I’m out of my field here—the qualities, the various cost estimates that are used; to be able to understand what the impact is, on society, of particular illnesses; and in turn, how we can make modifications in the system to be able to reduce the total public health impact.

I would say that in putting together a model of this type, a key element is flexibility. We have something, we hope, that will allow us to update things on an ongoing basis as we get better and better data to feed into the model. We want something that’s transparent. Actually, one of the things that this software platform lets us do is allow users to go in and modify estimates or assumptions. And for many of you who are familiar with a lot of the data in food safety, there are a tremendous number of assumptions that go into our estimates of things like incidence. Consequently, we want something where it’s very clear to people where the numbers are coming from, [and that has the] potential to allow people to modify those and see what impact it has on the overall risk ranking, in terms of seeing what particular pathogens or food-pathogen combinations are having the greatest impact on public health.

We are anticipating that we will have this in an Internet-accessible format. Again, the idea is to distribute this widely, both in terms of conferences, but also through the Internet, so that users can begin to take this down, make it their own, and use it in ways in which they can best utilize these types of data to begin to deal with the overall question of food safety.

In terms of time frame, we’re optimistic—and probably overly so—in saying that we hope to have a model that will be generally available by the end of the year. It’s going to be an interesting year if we actually pull this off, but that’s our goal. We hope to have a basic model and structure in place with an expert consensus on the approach used in its development. Clearly, additional refinement and expansion of the model are anticipated, along with optimization of the data inputs. But we’re hopeful that this phase-one model is going to provide us a powerful tool to begin to address key policy issues related to food-borne disease.

Again, I would emphasize, though, this is just a tool. The objectives of the consortium go far beyond this. But this is one practical way in which we have begun to move forward in developing methodologies which cut across borders and across boundaries, which go across multiple disciplines—from epidemiology, food-borne disease surveillance, microbiology, economics, political science, everything else that’s represented in the consortium—to be able to put together things, methodologies, tools, that will be of use to the food safety community.

FSRC Home » Events » Consortium Launch »Transcript (top) » Part VI

Question and Answer Session  Audio

AUDIENCE MEMBER (Skip Seward, American Meat Institute): Thank you, Mike. Thanks for the presentation and opening remarks that helped a lot to clarify what the objectives are. Your first project is development of the model, which helps in decisionmaking, but I also heard that you’re very interested in delivering practical tools that have practical value. And from an industry perspective, sometimes there’s a pretty big gap between a decisionmaking model and practical tools of practical value. So I would encourage you, if the idea behind the model is to identify—and I guess I’m looking for your feedback on that—are you using it to identify data gaps and so forth, then drive what your research objectives are, to deliver the practical tools with practical value?

Michael TAYLOR: Let me just make a comment. It’s a very critical point and something we need and will keep our focus on. How can the work we do be of practical value? This risk-ranking model has potential for that in a couple of different ways. One, as you say, as soon as you start getting an organized way of thinking about data and integrating data to do something like ranking risk, you do zero in on where the data gaps are—and there are abundant data gaps. So it’s critical to recognize that this tool for organizing and analyzing data to rank public health impact—but we’re really integrating incidence data, links to particular foods, and then economic information—is going to show data gaps.

Nevertheless, even for that purpose as a tool, …it shows where we ought to be investing in data collection. We think we’ve got a model, though, in development that will be robust enough, when it’s produced with the data available, to shed some light on what is the relative public health impact [of] particular hazards, looked at from a number of different directions. Again, with no right answer emerging from the application of the model, [it will have] the ability to—on any number of metrics, whether they’re economic, or number of deaths, or number of cases—to be able to show what the relative impacts are.

Long-term, though—and let me just stress this—is that this risk-ranking model is just the first of a series of tools, because I think we start off recognizing that it’s not enough to just know what the largest hazard is. You need to really figure out how you can get the most bang for the buck in reducing risk, which means taking into account, “What are the interventions that are available? Do they work? To what extent? How do they interact with other interventions and activities?” It’s that next stage of evaluative work which we like to think could lead to a model for prioritizing opportunities to reduce risk. Again, you want to focus on the biggest risk, but then it’s a matter of prioritizing the opportunities for reducing that we want to get to.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (Lance Gay, Scripps Howard News Service): Is there an implied criticism here, amongst you all, that the government’s current regulatory policies are not working?

Michael TAYLOR:  Those of us who have worked in the system have a keen awareness of the difficulty of the job the agencies do and how hard they work to do it. It’s been documented and acknowledged by the agencies, as well as a lot of expert bodies, but there’s room to improve the way in which resources are allocated in relation to risk. What we’re really doing is wanting to, as a set of research institutions, step into a research void that the agencies, from my experience, really can’t be expected to address. The agencies have got more than a full plate just dealing with what’s in front of them—today’s food safety problems. So we’re sort of looking long-term, bigger picture, and again, from the standpoint of the research community, simply filling a research void that I think is the responsibility of the research community to address. So the answer’s no.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (David Bilchek, Italian Meat Processing Industry): Will you be working with institutions abroad?

Michael TAYLOR:  The answer to that is yes. We’re obviously focusing on the U.S. food safety system, but we construe that in the broadest possible terms. It’s not just the regulatory system, it’s not just the government, and obviously, in today’s world, can’t be just the U.S. industry or U.S. public institutions. As we proceed down the pathway, we would absolutely hope that would happen and welcome any suggestions, ideas, or offers of collaboration. We are totally open to that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (Martin Mick, Food Safety, Inc.): I was curious as to whether the consortium anticipates the creation of subcommittees for individual focus efforts in particular areas.

Michael TAYLOR:  I think what we envision, and this is going to be the hard work that the steering committee and the expert panel will be beginning next week, is planning out a course of research and research projects that will add up in the end to the tools that we need to do the kind of prioritization and resource allocation we’re talking about. So that will mean carving the work up into pieces. For example, consumer behavior, the behavior of food handlers at retail, clearly is a part of the picture of understanding where there are opportunities for interventions to reduce risk. And so as we design research projects to address those, we would expect to interact with the relevant stakeholder community and expert community to pursue those.

…on this risk-ranking model project, an example of how we plan to operate is that, this spring, we’ll be going around and hoping to sit with folks in agencies, industry groups, and so forth, to show the model at an early stage of development, for purposes of getting input. It’s not literally a subcommittee approach, but it’s a way of defining a project in a size that you can do, and then engaging whoever is interested and can contribute to doing it well. So we look for opportunities and suggestions along those lines.

AUDIENCE MEMBER (Peg Colman, Food Safety and Inspection Service): I’m with our risk assessment division, and I have some questions about the model. It seems very comprehensive as a risk analysis tool, but as a risk assessor, I see a couple of gaps. For example, the levels of pathogens aren’t mentioned and those response relationships aren’t mentioned. Are they built into the tools and into the model explicitly?

Michael TAYLOR:  I could give my lay answer to that, which I would be satisfied with, but maybe Dr. Morris ought to answer that.

Dr. J. Glenn MORRIS, Jr., Chairman, Department of Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine:  They’re not in this model yet. Again, what this model does is start by allowing us to rank risks or to rank the various food-pathogen combinations in terms of their public health impact. This is a first step, and if you will, this is what we would regard as a front end to what ultimately will be a larger model or a compilation of models. And what I would anticipate is that many of the very detailed risk assessments that have been done by agencies, which are usually pathogen specific or pathogen-food specific, would then feed into a model such as this. That would allow us, then, to go back and begin to look at the impact of specific interventions, not just on a specific food or food-pathogen combination, but in an overall context.

So again, what I am anticipating is that the goal of this, again, this is not to take ownership of one thing, just for this consortium, but to reach out to everyone involved. So what I would anticipate is that we’d be working very closely with your shop as we develop these tools to see how we can best integrate with the models that you’re developing. So that there will be the value added of the models that you’re developing—in terms of specific pathogens, pathogen multipliers, dose-response curves—in turn feeding into this type of model, which would then move it all the way through the economic analysis side. To try to bring together the expertise of not only the universities but also the federal agencies involved, so that we’re all working on this together.

Michael TAYLOR: Just to underscore, as we’ve thought about the building blocks for a model to prioritize opportunities to reduce risk, risk assessment is the foundational building block for that. On top of that, you want to be assessing interventions and the effectiveness of interventions, the interaction of interventions, to reduce risk, but you can’t do that unless you’ve got a really good understanding of how the risk arises, what’s the character of the risk, including all the issues you’ve just mentioned. So that risk assessment will be foundational.

Thank you, really, very much for coming. We will all be around. I think there’s coffee outside and would welcome followup questions for the next little while. Thank you.