Potentially emerging food safety issue: an analysis of the reports published by the European union's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and a discussion of the melanine case study

Within the SAFE FOODS project, an analysis of data notified to RASFF was carried out in order to explore the possibility to identify emerging trends in food safety hazards (Kleter et al., 2009). Kleter et al. (2009) used data from weekly overviews of the notifications during a four-year period from July 2003 until June 2007 as a basis for calculations and trend analysis. The authors obtained weekly overviews containing tables with data of alert and information notifications from the RASFF website (RASFF, 2007). In this paper, we have reported briefly the outcomes obtained by Kleter et al. (2009) and for giving a vision more current of the main food and feed hazards, we have also reported data obtained from the annual report 2010. The annual report 2010 was obtained from Italian Ministry of Health website (Ministero della Salute, 2011). Moreover, to understand the RASFF role in presence of a risk for human and/or animal health, we have carried out a study of the recent melamine case. The information regarding the melamine case were obtained from the RASFF annual reports (RASFF, 2011).