Expert Elicitation and
Its Role in RBI
Daniel Engeljohn, Ph.D.
Office of Policy, Program, and Employee
Development, FSIS, USDA
It’s use:
For ranking the relative
public health risk of FSIS
inspected products
Goal of Risk Based Inspection
To allocate FSIS resources in a manner that
best protects public health
Estimations of the contribution of a particular
food to a subsequent human illness is difficult
There are several ways to attribute food to
illness; each has its own strengths and caveats
Methods for Attribution
Three different methods for illness attribution.
Expert elicitation
Predictive models
Epidemiological data analysis
By comparing the results of multiple methods
FSIS can improve the final rankings.
Please Note:: Many of the following ideas were summarized by the food attribution working group and
published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Michael B. Batz, Michael P. Doyle, J. Glenn Morris, Jr.,
John Painter, Ruby Singh, Robert V. Tauxe, Michael R. Taylor, and Danilo M.A. Lo Fo Wong, for the
Food Attribution Working Group
Expert Elicitations
FSIS recently conducted two independent expert elicitations
to define the relative risks posed to public health by
processed meat and poultry products
Two elicitations:
One with 22 experts and the other with 12 experts from industry,
academia and public health sector
Both generally defined 24 meat and poultry product categories
Both ranked these foods to relative risk to public health
Strengths
Can be performed even when there is little available data
Can help to resolve discrepancies between other methods
Caveats:
Judgment based
May be less objective than data driven decisions
Predictive Models
Estimate the public health risk of a food based on a
variety of data inputs. By estimating illnesses attributed to
each product a ranking of FSIS foods can be determined.
FSIS has developed predictive models to estimate the number of
illnesses attributed to meat, poultry, egg products (including raw
and ready-