A Tale of Two Food Risks: BSE and Farmed Salmon in Canada

Today the public has access to enhanced resources for interpreting the technical basis of risk communication messages, emanating from government and industry, dealing with food risk issues. These resources include extensive media reporting on key scientific studies as well as Internet sites, hosted by many different players, where the scientific and statistical basis for risk assessments are presented, debated, and criticized. In this information-rich context risk managers are challenged to present a clear, forthright, and honest account of the scientific and statistical underpinnings -- including uncertainties -- for their risk estimations. We discuss these issues in the context of two recent Canadian food risk cases, BSE in cattle and farmed salmon. In the BSE case the government's risk communications failed to accurately express the nature and scope of the risk as it had been evaluated by government officials in technical documentation; specifically, the complex statistical manipulations served as a smokescreen behind which was hidden the true -- catastrophic -- risk, namely, that the discovery of even a single case of BSE in the Canadian herd would have “extreme” consequences for the entire group of small, independent beef producers. In the case of farmed salmon, our study shows that the contaminant numbers are open to differences in interpretation among government agencies, and that understanding the level of risk is no simple business. The industry should have acted years ago to ensure that the public was provided with reliable resources for understanding the nature of chemical contaminants in fish and the risk assessment methodologies used for determining safe levels of consumption.