We must wait years to set the allergen threshold, says FSA

Establishing thresholds for the adventitious presence of allergens such as milk, peanuts and egg could take "four to five years", the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has admitted.

The Europrevall project which is exploring the prevalence of allergies across Europe, diagnostic tools and the impact of processing and food matrices on allergens is due to report back this year. The MoniQA project on testing methods and protocols is also progressing apace.

But this did not mean that thresholds would immediately follow, said Chun-Han Chan from the FSA's food allergy branch, who was speaking at Food Manufacture's allergens conference last month. "We have only just commissioned research to analyse EuroPrevall data to generate dose response curves and test the efficacy of commercial allergen detection kits. We have also only just commissioned further research into how much clinical thresholds can vary from person to person and within the individuals."

She added: "It's realistically going to take two or three years for this work to be completed and after that we have to approach EFSA (the European Food Safety Authority), which advises the Commission about thresholds."

However, a lot of progress had been made on new statistical modelling techniques for estimating risk at a population level, said Unilever's food allergy project leader Dr Stella Cochrane. "We're going to be able to set clinical thresholds on a population level for things like peanuts. There is a lot of work still to do, but the tools do exist to assess risk from allergenic foods."

Legally defined thresholds would provide firms with action levels to work to, plus defined levels for enforcement. They should also reduce 'may contain' labelling. However, in the absence of official EU thresholds for allergens, many UK food manufacturers were working to unofficial limits or using the threshold-based Australian VITAL scheme as a guide, said one delegate: "If we are not going to have thresholds in the EU for five years, what are we supposed to do in the meantime?"

RSSL head of allergen services Simon Flanagan added: "There was a recall recently on dark chocolate that contained milk. It did actually have a 'may contain' label but was recalled because it contained 'too much' milk. But how much is too much?"