Training workshop on the food-based risk assessment model "ImproRisk", 20-21 September 2022, Larnaca, Cyprus

On 20-21 September 2022, the State General Laboratory (SGL) of Cyprus (Ministry of Health) organized jointly with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Larnaca-Cyprus, a follow up training workshop on the "ImproRisk" model of risk assessment for chronic dietary toxicity of chemicals.

The main objective of the workshop was to provide training on the online dietary exposure assessment model, ImproRisk, developed by the State General Laboratory of Cyprus, with regards to its applicability in chemical risk assessment. In this context, key topics were the management of the occurrence data and the food consumption data in order to be used as inputs to the model, the applied exposure assessment methodology and the model’s final outcome.

The workshop was attended by 21 experts from the Food Safety Authorities/Risk Assessment Institutes of the European Union (EU) Member States and the EU accession countries. A combination of lectures and practical interactive case studies, mainly consisting of computational tasks, enabled participants to apply the knowledge gained to simple examples.

The Director of the SGL, Dr Stelios Yiannopoulos, while welcoming the experts, emphasized to the importance of dietary risk assessment for ensuring public health and thanked the European Food Safety Authority for jointly conducting the workshop in Cyprus. He then presented the SGL's activities in the field of food safety and food safety assessment as a result of the successful cooperation with EFSA. SGL officials had the opportunity to train the participants on the food risk assessment model "ImproRisk" through a demonstration of its capabilities and practise on specific examples/case studies.

ImproRisk is an open access model for conducting chronic dietary exposure assessment for chemicals. The users of the model are able to estimate dietary exposure to a chemical substance of interest at any level of the food classification and description system FoodEx2 developed by EFSA, considering the FoodEx2 base term and the processing facet descriptor (F28). The model allows the estimation of the dietary exposure statistics for subjects with different demographic characteristics such as age, gender and area of living within the country. Exposure estimates are also stratified by these demographic characteristics. In this context, ImproRisk model is considered as a tool for facilitating decision making since it provides information regarding the percentage of the population exceeding the health-based guidance value for the chemical substance under study.

The aim of the training workshop, which was an initiative of the SGL with the support of EFSA, is to contribute to the development of further scientific capacity in food safety risk assessment in the EU and EU accession countries. …..find more about the Agenda of the workshop