Prima phacie¹: a new European Food Safety Authority funded research project taking a comparative approach to pest risk assessment and methods to evaluate pest risk management options

Abstract

In late 2009, a European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)‐funded project (Prima phacie) began work to review and test methodologies for conducting pest risk assessment by means of case studies on three phytoplasmas (Candidatus Phytoplasma mali, Ca. P. prunorum, Ca. P. pyri); two bacteria (Acidovorax avenae subsp. citrulli, Xanthomonas citri [=X. axonopodis] pv. citri); two fungi (Guignardia citricarpa, Mycosphaerella dearnessii); two nematodes (Meloidogyne chitwoodi, M. fallax); and an insect (Anoplophora glabripennis). Multiple risk assessment schemes and methods will be applied to each of the case study pests, allowing for a comparative assessment of methods. Methods to assess the effectiveness of possible risk management options for each pest will also be evaluated. The project will further develop the scientific basis for pest risk assessment within the European Community and identify methodologies most suitable for conducting risk assessments and for evaluating the effectiveness of possible risk management options by the EFSA Panel on Plant Health in order to support European decision making. The project lasts 29 months, and is being conducted by an international consortium of 11 partners consisting of phytosanitary organizations, research institutes and a university. Results will be disseminated via conventional publications and at a workshop in March 2012.

Bayesian Networks to Compare Pest Control Interventions on Commodities Along Agricultural Production Chains

“…A criticism that is often made of Bayesian networks concerns the large number and the difficulty of estimating a large number of probabilities. Recent work to improve European decision‐support schemes in PRA––“Prima phacie” and “PRATIQUE”––used networks analogous to Bayesian networks but with parameterization made possible by offering users choices from restricted sets of probability distributions that had direct correspondence to an existing risk‐rating system with which PRA practitioners were already familiar. In these projects, parameterization was also made easier by designing the network such that each child node had no more than two parents, so keeping the CPTs more manageable .…”

EU‐project DROPSA: first achievements regarding pathway analyses for fruit pests

“…One task, led by Imperial College London (UK), is developing specific methods to quantify the risk of introduction, using research findings of other projects (e.g. EFSA‐projects ‘QPA Food’ – Quantitative pathway analysis for pest entry with food products – and ‘Prima phacie’, MacLeod et al ., ). Pests identified in the review or from the alert lists will be used as case examples in that task.…”

Risk assessment in support of plant health

“…Several grants were awarded by EFSA to Member State organisations to develop methodologies and to conduct preparatory work for pest risk assessment on structured inventories of data sources and models for pest risk assessment (Rossi et al, 2009a,b); comparison of pest risk assessment casestudies (MacLeod et al, 2010) and on knowledge gaps and uncertainties (Steffek et al, 2011(Steffek et al, , 2012.…”