Drilling Down Multiple Data Sources for Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Analyses: The Story of a “Tomato Mashup” for an Integrated Approach.

Abstract

Public health agencies responsible for food safety are facing many information challenges as food production and distribution systems, become increasingly complex. Integrated risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses can help decision makers choose appropriate policies to address major public health problems. One component of an integrated analysis is the exposure assessment. The exposure assessment is the probability of exposure to a particular food associated with a particular hazard or nutrient. The probability of exposure can be characterized by integrating relevant supply chain information in a model. However, as terabytes of information are being generated for multiple purposes and by diverse entities and institutions, analysts are often encumbered by efforts in finding relevant data or deciding how to choose the best data for their analyses. Thanks to developments in informatics, some of the tools used by analysts such as decision support technologies can better highlight the merits that a model can achieve because they allow integrating multiple data sources, visualizing the data –geographically, as an influence diagram or other form of graphical expression-and also provide an interface that prevents the separation of end users from analysts. This is better illustrated by following a tomato through different points in the supply chain. The data from different sources can be made relevant in estimating both probability -based and frequency-based consumption and exposure to potential hazards or nutrients.