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Published on: February 13, 2015
Attribution of foodborne pathogens using structured expert elicitation.
Arie H Havelaar1, Angela Vargas Galindo, Dorotha Kurowicka
1Laboratory for Zoonoses and Environmental Microbiology, Centre for Infectious Disease Control Netherlands, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, The Netherlands. arie.havelaar@rivm.nl
Foodborne Pathogens and Disease
|August 9, 2008
Summary
This study estimated how enteric illnesses spread through food, environment, animals, humans, and travel. Experts found foodborne transmission was lower than expected for many pathogens, highlighting areas for improved food safety interventions.
Area of Science:
- Food safety and public health
- Infectious disease epidemiology
- Risk assessment
Background:
- Enterically transmitted illnesses pose a significant public health burden globally.
- Understanding transmission pathways is crucial for effective prevention and control strategies.
- Previous source attribution studies have provided valuable insights but require refinement.
Purpose of the Study:
- To estimate the proportion of human enteric illnesses attributed to five major transmission pathways: food, environment, direct animal contact, human-human transmission, and travel.
- To further dissect the foodborne transmission pathway into 11 specific food groups.
- To assess the feasibility of structured expert judgment for source attribution of enteric diseases.
Main Methods:
- Structured expert elicitation involving 16 food safety experts.
- Utilized probabilistic inversion (PI) to create joint probability distributions for parameter estimation.
- Experts provided estimates for the most likely range of transmission parameters.
Main Results:
- Probabilistic inversion yielded good model fits for most pathogens studied.
- Expert-derived estimates for the fraction of foodborne transmission were lower than in some previous studies.
- Biologically less plausible transmission routes were assigned some weight by experts.
- Uncertainty in attribution estimates was lowest for pathogens with clearly dominant transmission routes.
Conclusions:
- Structured expert studies are a viable approach for source attribution of enteric illnesses.
- Further methodological development is needed to enhance the precision and reliability of expert-based attribution.
- These estimates, when combined with incidence and burden data, can inform public health policies and identify high-impact food groups for targeted interventions.
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