The DALY Calculator is a free, open-source Graphical User Interface for stochastic disability-adjusted life year (DALY) calculation, developed in the R environment for statistical computing. The main goal of the DALY Calculator is to provide a flexible and easy-to-use tool for DALY calculation, and to promote consistency in the uncertainty analysis of DALYs.

This web site provides access to a risk management simulation tool based on the Codex Guidelines for the Control of Campylobacter and Salmonella in Chicken Meat. The tool can describe the complete production-to-consumption flow path described in the guidelines. These models are referred to as process flows. Users may investigate one or both pathogens and determine which steps to include in the process flow. The tool is designed to compute the residual risk between a baseline process flow and a process flow applying selected interventions as outlined in the guidelines. The residual risk measure may be used to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the applied interventions.

The Food Related Emergency Exercise Boxed set (FREE-B) is a compilation of scenarios based on both intentional and unintentional food contamination events. It is designed with the intention of assisting government regulatory and public health agencies in assessing existing food emergency response plans, protocols and procedures that may be in place, or that they are in the process of revising or even developing. The FREE-B is designed to allow for multiple jurisdictions and organizations (medical community, private sector, law enforcement, first responder communities) to ‘play’ with the host agency, or, quite simply, for an individual agency to test their own plans, protocols and procedures independently.

This toolkit is geared to helping food security professionals develop a communication strategy and communicate more effectively with their target audiences. Specific sections of the toolkit focus on policy makers and the media, because of the important role they play in implementing and influencing food security policies.The toolkit also looks at specific information products such as policy briefs, reports and early warning bulletins, and suggests ways to structure and improve them. A section on writing effectively, which focuses on grammar and style, makes sure that written documents are easy to read. Finally, the toolkit gives tips for using the internet, social media and Web 2.0 tools as these technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for engaging in two way dialogues with global audiences. The toolkit also includes readymade templates and dozens of tips and tricks distilled from many years of experience.

A novel purpose of the use of mathematical models in quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) is to identify the sources of microbial contamination in a food chain (i.e., biotracing). In this article we propose a framework for the construction of a biotracing model, eventually to be used in industrial food production chains where discrete numbers of products are processed that may be contaminated by a multitude of sources. The framework consists of steps in which a Monte Carlo model, simulating sequential events in the chain following a modular process risk modeling (MPRM) approach, is converted to a Bayesian belief network (BBN). The resulting model provides a probabilistic quantification of concentrations of a pathogen throughout a production chain. A BBN allows for updating the parameters of the model based on observational data, and global parameter sensitivity analysis is readily performed in a BBN. Moreover, a BBN enables “backward reasoning” when downstream data are available and is therefore a natural framework for answering biotracing questions. The proposed framework is illustrated with a biotracing model of Salmonella in the pork slaughter chain, based on a recently published Monte Carlo simulation model. This model, implemented as a BBN, describes the dynamics of Salmonella in a Dutch slaughterhouse and enables finding the source of contamination of specific carcasses at the end of the chain.

ArcGIS.com is a Web site for working with maps and other types of geographic information. Visit the site to create maps; find and use maps, applications, and tools; and share your maps and applications with others. Within the site, you will find applications for building and sharing maps. You will also find useful basemaps, data, applications, and tools that you can view and use, plus communities you can join.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created multiple outbreak response toolkits and other resources to assist public health professionals during their outbreak response to save time on creating tools so more time can be spent on the investigation. This finding aid directs the user to many such tools. 

This resource is a guide to using social media to improve reach of health messages, increase access to your content, further participation with audiences and advance transparency to improve health communication efforts.

Several investigators have suggested that antibiotic use in food-producing animals is a major contributor to the increasing incidence of antimicrobial-resistant organisms causing illness in humans. In this paper, the researchers discuss this and other assumptions relevant to a quantitative risk assessment model for salmonellosis in humans. The researchers also discuss other important aspects of modeling food safety and food-associated antimicrobial resistance risk to humans. 

Recent work suggests that uncertainty about risks also plays a role in predicting choices and behavior. In this article, researchers develop and estimate a formal model for an individual's perceived health risks associated with arsenic contamination of his or her drinking water. The modeling approach treats risk as a random variable, with an estimable probability distribution whose variance reflects uncertainty. The model the researchers estimate uses data collected from a survey given to a sample of people living in arsenic-prone areas in the United States. 

A self-regulated epidemic model was developed to describe the dynamics of Salmonella Typhimurium in pig farms and predict the prevalence of different risk groups at slaughter age. The model was focused at the compartment level of the pig farms and it included two syndromes, a high and a low propagation syndrome. These two syndromes generated two different classes of pigs, the High Infectious and the Low Infectious, respectively, which have different shedding patterns. 

The WHO/IPCS Risk Assessment Toolkit (RA Toolkit) project aims to make the international tools on chemical risk assessment more readily accessible, especially to relevant stakeholders in developing countries and countries with economies in transition.

This website includes records of the meeting introducing the pilot phase of the draft WHO Risk Assessment Toolkit in Thailand, Malaysia and China (Bangkok meeting, July 2009).

The RA Toolkit is organized into sections that provide:

-An overview of chemical RA, including the RA framework and uses of RA;

-Generic road maps for how to conduct RA;

-Listing of international resources that are useful for conducting RAs; and

-Examples of how that information can be applied to a RA question, including case-specific roadmaps.

SurveyShare is a web site that lets users design and conduct online surveys. Surveys and response data are hosted on our secure servers. Each survey is given a unique web address (URL) where respondents can take the survey. It is possible to see the results, along with simple averages and percentages, and access the individual responses and collected results in real-time as respondents complete your survey. SurveyShare provides limited cross-tabulation options as well as customizable charts and graphs to help you analyze your data. For more sophisticated analyses,  download survey data and examine it with statistics tools or spreadsheet software. 

In this paper, the authors summarize the application of extensions to the Hald, Dutch, and Island models for source attribution to the isolates from a sentinel collection site over a 4 year period, focusing on the temporal variation in the attribution through time.

Multnomah County Environmental Health, with funding from the Food and Drug Administration, has created this Food Defense toolkit to help restaurants secure their facilities from intentional food contamination. The toolkit uses an 8-point risk assessment system to prompt restaurant managers to monitor frequently overlooked security areas and offers suggested remedies that can be tailored to each restaurant’s unique situation. An employee training guide, training videos and posters complete the toolkit.

This web application allows users a way to integrate genotypic and phenotypic data in a geospatial context. When viewed in a virtual globe (e.g. Google Earth or NASA WorldWind), the user has an interactive map of the spread of various lineages of organisms (e.g. strains of pathogens) over the earth.

Here, the authors adapted and applied the Hald model to L. monocytogenes to determine whether such an approach may provide further insight and quantify the relative importance of food sources to listeriosis cases, including risk population groups such as the elderly.

In this article, the authors present the application of discrete-event modeling in the context of a Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) for Listeria monocytogenes in fresh-cut iceberg lettuce. Moreover, the authors show the potential value of discrete-event modeling in QMRA by calculating logistic interventions (modifications in the logistic chain) and determining their significance with respect to food safety.

In this study, the authors propose a class of hierarchical models for the purpose of estimating the herd-level prevalence distribution and the accuracies of two tests in the absence of a gold standard when several exchangeable populations with differing disease prevalence are available for sampling, relaxing the assumption of conditional independence between tests. The models are used to estimate the prevalence of bovine brucellosis in Mexican cow herds and to estimate the error rates of two tests for the detection of swine pneumonia.

In previous work a deterministic model for the compartment level was built, taking into account the two different syndromes with which Salmonella Typhimurium appears at pig farms. Based on this model, a stochastic one was built in this work that simulated different compartmental sizes, taking into account compartments of 200 to 400 pigs. Multiple scenarios of starting conditions of infection were tested for each population size. The effect of each of these two factors on the probability of disease extinctions and the prevalence of each of the classes of the model and the risk groups of pigs were estimated.

CARVER + Shock is an offensive targeting prioritization tool adapted from the military version (CARVER) for use in the food industry. The tool can be used to assess the vulnerabilities within a system or infrastructure to an attack. It allows the user to think like an attacker to identify the most attractive targets for an attack. By conducting a CARVER + Shock assessment of a food production facility or process, the user can determine the most vulnerable points in their infrastructure, and focus resources on protecting the most susceptible points in their system.

A Bayesian approach was developed by Hald et al. to estimate the contribution of different food sources to the burden of human salmonellosis in Denmark. This article describes the development of several modifications that can be used to adapt the model to different countries and pathogens.

This Toolbox is an area on NACCHO's Web site where you can find useful public-health-related tools. Toolbox is a free service available for public use, intended to promote and advance public health objectives. Enter a keyword or select a toolkit to find search-able information.

Database of foods, their nutrient values, and weights for typical food portions, including data for food energy and 62 nutrients/food components. The database is available for download in Microsoft Access or ASCII delimited file format

Foods and cosmetics are examples of regulated products which are sometimes reformulated in response to changes in the marketplace or regulatory environment. RTI and the Economics Team at the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) produced this model, based on the earlier labeling cost model, to help estimate the costs incurred in reformulation due to changes in regulations. The report provides information on the process of reformulation and a description of the underlying assumptions and calculations used in developing the model. Instructions for using the model are in Section 4 of the report

The WorldFood Dietary Assessment System is designed to facilitate rapid dietary assessment using an IBM-compatible personal computer. A list of 1800 foods reported in six countries (Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Senegal, India, and Indonesia) has been compiled and can be accessed through user-friendly menus. Users can specify foods and amounts in a one-day diet using a menu-driven food selection process. The system provides totals for 48 nutrients and percents of internationally recommended intakes for 21 nutrients.

Tool for estimating the costs of illness for selected foodborne illnesses. Assumptions used in the estimate may be changed to reflect the desired scenario. ERS calculated costs are also given, and the assumptions used in calculating these costs may be examined

An update to RTI's 1990 labeling cost model to better meet the FDA's current needs in estimating labeling costs. The report, entitled "FDA Labeling Cost Model: Final Report," includes background information, discussion of the revised cost estimates used in the model, a description of the assumptions and calculations used, and instructions for using the model. The model and instructions are downloadable. Software requirements: Stata and Microsoft Excel.
Acknowledgement:
With special thanks to the Economics Team in FDA-CFSAN, Office of Scientific Analysis and Support, Division of Market Studies