20th International Congress of Nutrition: Food Allergy
Granada, Spain
September 19, 2013
Operational management of allergens still suffers from the lack of an agreed set of reference values defining a tolerable level of risk. Food allergy is of growing importance to public health, affecting consumers’ quality of life (mainly children) and impacting health service resources. The symptoms range from a tingling sensation in the mouth to life-threatening anaphylactic shock. An agreed set of tolerable levels of risk is still missing. Minimizing the risk from allergenic foods is a shared responsibility of all the stakeholders involved (patients, clinicians, food manufacturers, retailers, caterers and regulators). This ICN session will provide an overview of the global effort that has been undertaken to review new low-dose challenge data and tools to analyze these data and apply them to quantitative risk assessment. Previously, there was a Workshop on “Food Allergy: From Thresholds to Action Levels”, in September 2012, to share the work of global experts and to foster a consensus over the feasibility of defining reference values. The Technical Committee on Food and Chemical Safety supported the Food Allergy Resource and Research Program’s (FARRP) approach to focus on probabilistic risk assessment for establishing thresholds and commissioned a peanut data set that FARRP researched and published in 2010. This research led to further opportunities for data acquisition by the TNO (Netherlands), ILSI Europe, and the Allergen Bureau of Australia (VITAL). Recent research on the consumer’s perspective on living with food allergies will be presented. An overview of scientific approaches to evaluating novel proteins expressed in biotech products and the development of reliable and accurate methodologies for characterizing the allergenic potential of novel proteins will also be discussed.
Speaker Presentations
Introduction to ILSI’s Food Allergy Programs at the Different Branches
Diána Bánáti, ILSI Europe, BE
Allergens Prevalence
Clare E.N. Mills, Institute of Inflammation and Repair, University of Manchester, UK
Probabilistic Risk Assessment in Setting Allergen Thresholds
Steve Taylor, Food Allergy Research & Resource Program, University of Nebraska, USA
The Consumer Perspective – Living with Uncertainty
Audrey Dunn Galvin, School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, IE
Protein Allergenicity
Gregory S. Ladics, DuPont Company, USA (Co-Chair, HESI Protein Allergenicity Technical Committee)