Hazard identification and exposure assessment for microbial food safety risk assessment.

The four cornerstones of microbial food safety risk assessment are hazard identification, exposure assessment, hazard characterization, and risk characterization. These steps represent a systematic process for identifying adverse consequences and their associated probabilities arising from consumption of foods that may be contaminated with microbial pathogens and/or microbial toxins. This paper presents a discussion of the first two steps: hazard identification and exposure assessment, and considerations for different approaches that can be used to analyze the relevant information.