Present status and the strategies of application of microbial risk assessment (MRA) on livestock products in Korea

Microbial risk assessment (MRA) is a scientific tool that can be used to evaluate the level of exposure and the subsequent risk to human health due to specific pathogens in one or more foods. Therefore. the role of this MRA in food safety policy is to make an optimal decision for risk based standard. Recently, MRA methodologies have been rapidly developed to take into consideration the complexity of the food production, processing, and storage including the partitioning and mixing of the food and microbial community dynamics. There also has made endeavor the using MRA for the increasing in food safety that are associated with pathogens in Korea. The value of MRA for food safety managements enhanced when it is combined with livestock products because many microbial hazards involved in these products. However, even though arouse of interesting in MRA application livestock products, there is few in Korea and as yet there are some weakness; firstly, deficiency of appropriate data resources and modeling, i.e problems in the quantity and quality of suitable and relevant data. Secondly, there are needs to develop proper models to quantitatively estimate pathogen contamination levels to be used in our food production and retail environmental conditions because MRA aims to model the fate of pathogenic microorganisms along the food chain and the associated health risks. Thirdly, there is the limited availability of trained personnel with convergence technologies for MRA infrastructure and how to express the output of MRA to food safety managers and consumers. MRA is yet a relatively young branch on the risk analysis tree and it is not always possible to conduct a full MRA, but MRA will be increasingly used in the management of food safety because MRA allows the a priori estimation of impact on public health of interventions in the food chain, and the mathematical modeling in MRA is that it enhances insight in the important processes in the food pathway. Therefore, to get more sophisticated and meaningful MRA in livestock products in Korea, it should be developed in MRA methodologies meet our conditions and get better microbiological data.