Outcome of the public consultation on the draft guidance on expert knowledge elicitation in food and feed safety risk assessment

The EFSA has undertaken a public consultation on the draft guidance on expert knowledge elicitation in food and feed safety risk assessment. The draft guidance was prepared by a dedicated working group. The task of the working group is to propose a practical process to elicit quantitative parameters and their uncertainties in a probabilistic way from knowledgeable experts. The draft version presented the intermediate results after the first half of the project. The document was organised in three parts: part I presented the risk assessment context and the motivation for the use of expert knowledge elicitation; part II discussed different principles on framing the question, selecting the experts, eliciting uncertainty and aggregating the results of multiple experts; finally, part III presented three protocols for expert knowledge elicitation in detail. These protocols can be used as guidance for the development of adapted protocols for real-life questions in food and feed safety.

The public consultation was launched on 13 August 2013 and closed after an extension of the deadline on 15 October 2013. The comments provided insight into several potential difficulties in the text of the draft guidance and thus, enhanced the quality of the document. The relevant comments were taken into account and the guidance document was revised accordingly. The Working Group on Expert Knowledge Elicitation in Food and Feed Safety Risk Assessment acknowledges the usefulness and quality of the comments received and would like to thank all commentators for their interest and input to its current and future work. EFSA has committed to publish a technical report on the outcome of the public consultation on the guidance and presents hereafter the responses of the working group to the comments it received.