As part of a European Union-funded project (FP7) developing ‘Integrated approaches to food allergen and allergy management’, a database was constructed based on publicly available information on food allergen recalls in Europe, North America, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Over 2000 entries were made into the database. The database covers a 4-year period from 2011 to 2014 and each entry is categorised into food type (two different classifications), identified allergen and cause where indicated by the authorities. Across different authorities, by far the biggest incidence of undeclared allergens occurred in the food categories of prepared dishes and snacks (range = 12–53%), and cereals and bakery products (range = 14–25% of all recalls and/or alerts). The biggest incidence of undeclared allergens, according to the information from most authorities, occurred for milk and milk products (16–31% of all products with recall or alert), followed by cereals containing gluten (9–19%), soy (5–45%), and egg and egg products (5–17%). Although 42–90% of the products with recalls/alerts were explained as being ‘Not indicated on the label’, this is a generic explanation of cause and does not provide much insight into the causes of the recall/alerts. However, 0–17% of products with recalls/alerts could be coded as caused by the unintended presence of an allergen as the probable result of cross-contact in production. Construction of the database of allergen recalls has provided some important lessons and recommendations to the authorities are made in this paper in terms of the harmonisation of the reporting of allergen recalls into a more standardised format.

Photosynthetic performance of algal-bacterial biofilms from an Italian wastewater treatment plant was studied in a flow-lane photobioreactor at different irradiances, temperatures, and flow regime to evaluate the effects of these environmental parameters on biofilms’ functioning, in view of application of these communities in wastewater biological treatment. Pulse amplitude modulated fluorescence was used to estimate the effective quantum yield of PSII (ΔF/F_m’) of the light-acclimated biofilms and to perform rapid light curves (RLCs) for the determination of the photosynthetic parameters (rel.ETR_max, α, I_k). Chl a, ash free dry weight (AFDW), and dry weight (DW) were measured to assess phototrophic and whole biofilm biomass development over time. From the analysis of photosynthetic parameter variation with light intensity, temperature and flow rate, it was possible to identify the set of experimental values favoring biofilm photosynthetic activity. Biomass increased over time, especially at the highest irradiances, where substrata were fastly colonized and mature biofilms developed at all temperatures and flow conditions tested.

Semisoft cheese made from raw sheep's milk is traditionally and economically important in southern Europe. However, raw milk cheese is also a known vehicle of human listeriosis and contamination of sheep cheese with Listeria monocytogenes has been reported. In the present study, we have developed and applied a quantitative risk assessment model, based on available evidence and challenge testing, to estimate risk of invasive listeriosis due to consumption of an artisanal sheep cheese made with raw milk collected from a single flock in central Italy. In the model, contamination of milk may originate from the farm environment or from mastitic animals, with potential growth of the pathogen in bulk milk and during cheese ripening. Based on the 48‐day challenge test of a local semisoft raw sheep's milk cheese we found limited growth only during the initial phase of ripening (24 hours) and no growth or limited decline during the following ripening period. In our simulation, in the baseline scenario, 2.2% of cheese servings are estimated to have at least 1 colony forming unit (CFU) per gram. Of these, 15.1% would be above the current E.U. limit of 100 CFU/g (5.2% would exceed 1,000 CFU/g). Risk of invasive listeriosis per random serving is estimated in the 10⁻¹² range (mean) for healthy adults, and in the 10⁻¹⁰ range (mean) for vulnerable populations. When small flocks (10–36 animals) are combined with the presence of a sheep with undetected subclinical mastitis, risk of listeriosis increases and such flocks may represent a public health risk.