Microbiological risk assessment of meat and seafoods

This thesis summarises elements of more than half a century of my work as an academic and as a consultant. It has been influenced by numerous events, responses and developments, to which I refer as footnotes. Of these, three developments have been pivotal: the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) concept, Quality Assurance (QA) and Predictive Microbiology. These are key elements of the discipline of Risk Assessment, which is the subject of this thesis ‚ÄövÑv¨ my involvement with risk assessments for the seafood and meat industries. However, underpinning any credible risk estimate is knowledge of the food process, the supply chain and information about how pathogens behave through that chain. These are the ‚ÄövÑv¿hard yards‚ÄövÑvp of risk assessment, without which modelers must rely on assumptions which, as we saw with early estimates of Covid illness and death, may be orders of magnitude from reality.