Webinar Features FDA-iRISK 2.0 Enhanced Version of FDA’s Publicly Available Food Safety Risk Assessment Tool
The Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN) at the University of Maryland will hold the webinar on March 11, 2015, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. EDT.
The webinar will highlight key features of FDA-iRISK® 2.0, an enhanced version of the free, Web-based system made available by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA developed this innovative tool to enable users to rank and compare risks from multiple foodborne microbial and chemical hazards and predict effectiveness of various prevention and control measures.
To register, please visit http://jifsan.umd.edu/register/registrant/fda-irisk-2.
The webinar is free, but registration is required. Because the number of participants will be limited, we encourage early registration. Registrants will receive information about how to access the webinar approximately two days in advance of the event. If you require special accommodations due to a disability, please notify the webinar organizers at JIFSAN@umd.edu after you register.
Background
Risk managers and others can use FDA-iRISK estimates of public-health outcomes to inform food-safety policy and other decisions. The system has many built-in features that allow users to conduct fully quantitative, fully probabilistic risk assessments relatively rapidly and efficiently. FDA-iRISK®enables users to build scenarios that reflect their real-world or theoretical food-safety issues by entering data in standard data-entry templates. Users may then assess and compare risks and interventions, for example, or vary the data they enter to explore how changes in various practices in the food chain would affect public-health outcomes.
Since FDA-iRISK’s initial launch, in 2012, FDA has continued to expand this innovative tool. New features of v2.0 include enhancements and new capacities for the underlying modeling methods and equations, user interface, and data sharing and reporting. Users now have access to advanced modeling capacity (e.g., rare events, maximum population density), can report results in new ways (e.g., number of cases, exposure at point of consumption), and have a number of new distribution options to represent contamination distribution and dose-response relationships for chemical and microbial hazards. Users also will be able to more quickly develop and evaluate alternative scenarios (e.g., sensitivity-analysis and copy features). User interface enhancements include ability to visualize dose-response curves and probabilistic distribution charts. Users also can share scenarios more easily (import repository feature).
FDA developed FDA-iRISK in collaboration with government and nongovernment experts, including Risk Sciences International. We will continue to develop this tool as advances in the risk assessment field emerge.
FDA-iRISK v2.0 (the tool itself) and related materials, such as a new user guide, fact sheets, and a technical document that describes the underlying mathematical architecture and equations, will be available to the public on foodrisk.org immediately following the webinar.