Dar seafood ppp standard

Alternative risk ranking methods

Many alternative measures are available for, or have been applied to, the task of ranking the public health and safety risks posed by food, including seafood. Several of these are discussed briefly, below. Further information on these approaches may be obtained by reference to the specific literature cited.

Ross and Sumner’s risk ranger

Risk ranger is a semi-quantitative tool for risk profiling based on deterministic Microsoft Excel spreadsheet functions, designed to help risk managers prioritise hazards for more intensive risk assessment and to inform decisions about the value of investing resources in fully quantitative risk assessments [24,25]. It can also be used to explore the effect of different risk management strategies or the extent of changes needed to bring about a desired reduction in risk.

Users of risk ranger input selections from a prepared list of qualitative statements or provide quantitative data (for example, survey or epidemiological data) to describe the commodity/hazard of interest. Based on these inputs, the tool calculates estimates of the probability and severity of outcomes arising from the level and frequency of exposure. These estimates include:

• 
  probability of illness per day per consumer of interest
  
• 
  total predicted illnesses per annum in the population of interest
  
• 
  comparative risk in the population of interest
  
• 
  a risk ranking.
  
  
  

The risk ranking is a logarithmic scale of risk with outputs ranging from zero (absence of risk) to 100 (certainty of death from each serving of food). Rankings were attributed to broad risk categories of Low: <32; Medium: 32–48; and High: >48.