Response to a report published by the Office for Risk Assessment & Research of the Netherlands Food and Product...

A report commenting on three quantitative pest risk assessments (qPRA) of the EFSA PLH Panel (Panel) was published in November 2025 by the Office for Risk Assessment & Research (BuRO) of the Netherlands Food and Product Safety Authority. In that report, the approaches applied by the Panel in three qPRA were narratively scrutinised against an unpublished protocol. According to the conclusions of the BuRO's report, all three qPRA approaches were methodologically valid and appropriate in substance. However, several assumptions made by the Panel in its assessments were debated and individual values of model parameters were questioned and/or replaced by BuRO calculations. This Panel statement responds to the specific comments, mathematically reviews the calculations in the BuRO's report and highlights how quantitative assessments under uncertainty may slightly differ in their output values when different risk assessors find different consensus interpretations of available background evidence. Some quantitative recalculations by BuRO required mathematical correction. Other recalculations depended on alternative ad hoc assumptions or parameter interpretations that the Panel does not consider sufficiently substantiated to replace those used in the assessments. Therefore, the conclusions of the three qPRA by the Panel remain unchanged. The Panel proposes recommendations to facilitate future commenting by external assessors on Panel outputs.