Health risk assessment: ANSES renews ten of its expert groups

ANSES systematically follows a collective expert appraisal process to conduct its health risk assessments. It selects experts from different disciplines and brings them together to examine a given issue. It takes all the available scientific data into account, listens to all the views and hypotheses expressed by the experts, and issues opinions, conclusions and/or recommendations that are systematically made public on its website. Several hundred independent scientists, belonging to major national and international research organisations, contribute as experts to the assessments conducted by ANSES, with the priority being to help safeguard consumers, workers and the environment.

The experts are selected following public calls for applications, and are chosen for their scientific competence and after examination of any potential conflicts of interest. They are appointed for three years, and have a wide variety of profiles and skills, guaranteeing independent, multidisciplinary, collective and adversarial scientific appraisals.

Today ANSES is issuing a call for applications in order to renew ten of its expert groups – six expert committees and four working groups in the areas of:

• food;
• nutrition;
• animal feed, health and welfare;
• plant health.

The Agency is seeking skills in many different areas: food hygiene and microbiology, food technology, microbial ecology, methods for the detection and characterisation of micro-organisms, biotechnology, toxicology, enzymology, materials chemistry, food manufacturing processes, food chemistry, food contaminants, agronomy, quantitative risk assessment, epidemiology, knowledge of regulations/standards, hazard analysis, knowledge of biological, physical and chemical hazards or allergens, human nutrition, nutritional epidemiology, animal husbandry, animal diseases, vectors, genetics, biology of pests, plant production, ecology, human and social sciences, etc.