CARMA: Food Safety and Expert Judgement

In The Netherlands, Campylobacter infections are estimated to cause yearly many health problems, deaths and considerable economic losses. Effective prevention of human campylobacteriosis requires a well-balanced set of control measures in the chicken meat production chain. To that aim the CARMA project is carried out in The Netherlands. Aspart of the project, RIVM and TU Delft executed an expert study to obtain estimates on input parameters of the risk assessment model for broiler chicken processing. The expert study focused on the transmission of Campylobacter in industrial chicken processing plants. Twelve experts have provided quantile assessments of the query variables. The aggregated expert data will be used to achieve uncertainty distributions of the model variables. With the results a generic picture will be present which will be used to assess possible risk abatement measures to prevent or reduce Campylobacter contamination in chicken processing lines as much as possible. The goal of this paper is to discuss the results of the expert judgement study.