Description

Context. The European Parliament has just called on Member States to strengthen their food safety control mechanisms by 2019 and this has become a priority for the French government1,2. Over the past few years, there has been substantial progress in microbiological safety3, as advances in molecular biology have helped develop rapid, cheap and sensitive methods that are now used by regulatory authorities to strengthen their inspection systems and by manufacturers for self-monitoring. On the chemical safety side, technical and societal transition is lagging behind. The current system is mainly reliant on surveillance and inspection plans revolving around high-performance reference methods capable of detecting toxic trace contaminants, but often expensive and cumbersome to implement, thus limiting the frequency and scope of controls. Moreover, these methods are mainly used to detect nonconformities, i.e. levels above a maximum residue limit (MRL), whereas the need for preventive monitoring together with the suspected health impact of chronic exposure to very low doses of key contaminants, require these contaminants to be monitored below MRL (sub-MRLs).

Objectives. SENTINEL's primary objective (see scheme below) is developing a panel of three complementary high-throughput, sensitive, cost-effective screening tools 1/ for strengthening the detection of non-conformities, but also 2/ for monitoring relevant sub-MRL levels of key contaminants.

When positive samples are detected, confirmatory analyses by approved laboratories may be requested prior to corrective (>MRL) or preventive (<MRL) actions carried on the food chain. With the final aim to better control consumer dietary exposure to these contaminants, the implementation of these novel tools should boost the screening of positive samples by food safety authorities (top-down approach) and permit sample self-monitoring by the agri-food industry (bottom-up approach). The second objective of the project is both to determine several practical and plausible implementation scenarios for the new tools, and to anticipate the main impacts of their meat sector implantation. The project will experiment an original three-stage method (scheme below), in order to improve the technological transfer from research to industry6 and to food safety authorities.

First, the conditions of SENTINEL tool implementation will be defined on the basis of the two most probable evolutions of the French meat supply chain. The design of scenarios is two-fold: 1) setting the reference scenarios (business-as-usual) of probable evolutions, and 2) devising the implementation of the new tools for PCB detection, by screening the new opportunities in the light of “similar cases”. Second, the potential economic, regulatory, social7 and public health8 impacts of these implementation scenarios will be assessed for each class of stakeholders, based on argumentation systems. Third, a global risk/benefit analysis of these scenarios will be undertaken according to a multi-criteria and multistakeholder analysis to support future decisions for food chain chemical safety surveillance.