Репозиторий Университета

© 2019 John Wiley  &  Sons Ltd Background: Understanding consumer perceptions is crucial if effective food safety policy and risk communication are to be developed and implemented. We sought to understand how those living with food allergy assess risk with precautionary allergen labelling (PAL) and their preference in how risks are communicated within a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) framework. Methods: The Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Risk Management (iFAAM) labelling online survey was developed for adults and parents of children with food allergy and distributed across Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and UK via patient support groups. Results: There were 1560 complete responses. ‘This product is not suitable for’ was selected as first choice for PAL by 46% overall and ‘May contain’ was selected as the first choice by 44%. Seventy-three percent reported that it would improve their trust in a product if a QRA process had been used to make a decision about whether to include ‘may contain’. Overall, 66% reported that a ‘statement + symbol’ on the label indicating a QRA, would help them to understand the risk assessment process that had been used by the food manufacturer. Conclusions: Consumers want to know what process has actually taken place for the placing of a PAL and/or risk assessment statement on a particular food product. Our findings provide a basis for the development of more informative communication around food allergen risk and safety and support evidence-based policy-making in the context of the legislative requirements of the European Union's Food Information for Consumers Regulation.

© NA Kuznetsov. This article reviews the main approaches to the interpretation of the term “risk”, which has acquired the status of a general scientific and widely interpreted concept. The unresolved issues of surgical risk terminology make it extremely difficult to solve the problem of perioperative prognosis at the narrow professional (medical) level. The author considers the problem of objec-tifying operational risk at an interdisciplinary level. In his opinion, understanding risk as a specific form of the subject’s active relation to the surrounding reality is the most justified at the present time. The essential particular features of such activities are the lack of confidence and the subject’s uncertainty in achieving the stated goal since a doctor’s professional activity takes place under conditions of risk, uncertainty and in contradictory situations. The author of the article suggests using the definition of “risk” proposed by A.P. Algin, according to which risk should be understood “as an activity connected with overcoming uncertainty and the situation of inevitable choice, in the process of which it is possible to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the probability of achieving the expected result, failure and deviation from the goal.” This definition prevents the use of antiscientific and scholastic views of this phenomenon. With reference to medical science (in particular, to surgery), this approach to risk allowed the author to formulate an individual quantitative prognosis and to distinguish five types of perioperative prognosis.