In the past decade, several risk assessments for Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) and Listeria monocytogenes have been developed to help guide management of these pathogens in various fresh produce commodities. However, there is a need to summarize and understand the sources of the parameters used in these models to better assess past and improve future risk assessments. This review identifies and then critically reviews 10 and 7 recently published, relevant risk assessments for STEC and L. monocytogenes, respectively, in leafy greens, aiming to extract and organize parameters for cross-study comparison of underlying data sources and mathematical formula. A total of 73 key parameters (53 and 20 for STEC and L. monocytogenes, respectively, 15 shared) were extracted across five stages in the produce supply chain, including (i) primary raw material production, (ii) harvest, (iii) packing houses and processing facilities, (iv) retail/food service, and (v) consumer storage and handling. For growth, die-off, and dose-response model parameters, 34 parameters were extracted for STEC and L. monocytogenes (17 each for STEC and L. monocytogenes, 6 shared). These analyses identified “consensus” parameters, used by most or all relevant risk assessments. Consensus parameters often came from a single or just a few sources, which limits the development of risk assessments that appropriately account for parameter variability and, particularly, uncertainty. While the summaries of parameter values presented here will provide a valuable reference list from which to pull values for future risk assessments, these also define future data needs, for example, to provide additional data for parameter estimates based on individual datasets. Future risk assessment may benefit from additional systematic review and meta-analyses of parameter estimates, and extension of this critical review and analysis to other pathogens, such as Salmonella.
You can view the list of authors in the AUTHORS file.
Corresponding author: Matthew J. Stasiewicz
103 Agricultural Bioprocess Lab
1302 W. Pennsylvania
Urbana, IL, 1361801
USA
+1-217-265-0963
[email protected]
The supplemental materials, found in the Supplementary Materials folder for this manuscript include a supplementary materials document and two master Excel spreadsheets: one for the parameter estimates extracted for STEC and one for L. monocytogenes. Clicking on each excel file will prompt you to download the file.
[Pending]
This project's dataset is licensed the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license. Please see the LICENSE.dataset files for details.
Funding for the project was made possible by The Center for Produce Safety project 2023CPS08. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of The Center for Produce Safety. (https://www.centerforproducesafety.org/).