FAO co-organizes workshop in Lao PDR to enhance use of food consumption data

FAO led a 3-week training course – with 25 participants gathered in Vientiane, Lao PDR and others on Zoom – in July 2021 to explain how to use dietary data. The attendees, included representatives from the Ministry of Health - the Lao Tropical and Public Health Institute (Lao-TPHI), Nutrition Center, Department of Hygiene and Health Promotion, and the University of Health Sciences, all of whom will be able to use the techniques to support evidence-based policymaking. 

The overall purpose of the training was to make the best use of data that had been gathered in a nation-wide food consumption survey conducted in 2016-2017, and has since been integrated in the FAO/WHO Global Individual Food consumption data Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT). The course, led by the Nutrition Assessment team of the Food and Nutrition Division, included sessions delivered by specialists in nutrition, food policy and food safety.

Food safety specialists can use the data to perform dietary exposure assessment to chemicals. The use of microdata allows for more refined assessments, supporting the identification of risk management options for the most vulnerable populations groups.

The food safety session was designed for participants to learn how to:

• Describe the possible uses of dietary data in FAO/WHO GIFT for food safety analyses;
• Describe the risk assessment process and how food consumption data support dietary exposure assessment to human health hazards;
• Understand the potential of the Lao PDR data and identify opportunities in the region for improving food safety.

Prior to the session participants were asked to provide their opinion and select the three most prevalent food safety hazards in the country, from a list of a possible ten hazards. When the results from all participants were reviewed, the top four responses were: organosphate pesticides, Salmonella spp, aflatoxin B1 and lead. “We started the discussion with their perceptions of risk,” said Luc Ingenbleek, FAO Food Safety Specialist. “Now in order to understand how accurate their estimates are, they will need to conduct specific studies, combining their food consumption data with data on the occurrence of hazards in their food,” he pointed out.

Panpilad Saikaew, from the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, illustrated how to use consumption data to set maximum residues limits (MRLs) for pesticides by sharing an example of lambda cyhalothrin in basil. “The risk assessment has to be conducted to ensure the levels are safe for consumer health,” she said, emphasizing the need for consumption data as well as supervised residue trial data to conduct an exposure assessment. 

After the workshop, all of the participants indicated in an evaluation that their training goals were fully or partly achieved. All of the participants responded that they were either somewhat likely or very likely to use the individual quantitative food consumption data generated in Lao PDR to carry out an exposure assessment, proving the success of the session highlighting the importance of food safety analyses. 

Read more on the FAO/WHO GIFT platform and investigate the data from Lao PDR here: http://www.fao.org/gift-individual-food-consumption/en/