3. Probabilistic assessment of contamination risk

3.1 Notions of risk analysis

Pessimistic scenarios consider a combination of extreme situations (worst-case scenarios) without weighting each overestimate according to its frequency of occurrence. Contamination is therefore calculated with a safety margin that is generally believed to be large, but which remains unknown. The aim of probabilistic modeling is to assess the risk of the "true" contamination value exceeding the predicted value. In this context, an overestimator is one whose risk of underestimating the "true" value is less than 50%. An underestimator, on the other hand, has a risk greater than 50%.

Contamination risk refers to the probability of obtaining a food contamination value above a certain threshold. It can be calculated when the physical...