Grant Agreements funded by EFSA made it possible to recruit three junior scientists – Sabrina ElMetennani, Laís Carvalho and Zineb Bradai – to dedicate to the Pathogens-In-Foods database. They are responsible for performing systematic reviews and data extraction, guided by the senior researchers, and will be carrying out their Masters research under PIF experts’ supervision.
The Pathogens-in-Foods database will be extended with occurrence data on Vibrio spp. in seafood produced and/or commercialised in Europe; and with data on parasites of public health importance in fishery products from farmed and wild caught fish worldwide. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will financially support these actions under the Agreement GP/EFSA/BIOHAW/2023/05 for the upcoming 3 years.
The new protocol for systematic review and the plan for harmonisation of the current food categorisation to EFSA’s FoodEx2 catalogue was explained by Dr. Vasco Cadavez in the presentation entitled “Discovering Pathogens-in-Foods: resources and applications of a database on occurrence data of foodborne pathogens in European-marketed foods” at the International Conference on Predictive Modelling in Food (ICPMF12), which took place on the 13-16th September 2023 at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. The presentation can be found on the PIF Zenodo Community PIF Zenodo Community.
From September 2022, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will financially support the continued development of the PIF database. The main goals of this Action are to harmonise the systematic review protocol and the food terminology of the database with those employed by EFSA. For the upcoming years, PIF will be sustained and updated with more data; and will continue to be an open resource for Member States and the wider scientific community.
Contract renewal by Anses (2021-2022) made it possible to finance two junior scientists – Ana Sofia Faria and Maiara Winter – to dedicate full-time to the Pathogens-In-Foods database. This year the whole team will continue to develop the web application (R-Shiny) to make the data and their advanced processing accessible to researchers and risk assessors.
The Pathogens-In-Foods Database “Prepare Data for Risk Assessment” was presented at the 80th EFSA’s Advisory Forum virtual meeting on the 9th June 2021. Dr. Moez Sanaa highlighted three key features of this project: Readiness for risk assessment, Embedded technical expertise, and Sustainability. With mutualised resources, the PIF database and the associated web application are intended by their developers to be open with free access for researchers and risk assessors.
The Pathogens-in-Foods database has been re-designed and is ready to receive data. Users can produce dynamic charts and summary statistics of incidence of bacteria in any food category, on a web application that is highly intuitive and easy to use. Pathogens-in-Foods has solid scientific and computational basis for growth, and is up to serve the scientific community and food authorities.
The concept of the Pathogens-in-Foods database and application was explained in the presentation entitled “A web application to access and analyse occurrence data of microbial hazards in foods” at the International Conference on Predictive Modelling in Food (ICPMF11), which took place on the 17-20th September 2019 in Bragança, Portugal. Dr. Gonzales-Barron pointed out that Pathogens-in-Foods was conceived to bring together prevalence and enumeration data of biological hazards in foods, which are plenty yet disperse, in a harmonised arrangement.
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