Meta-analysis for quantitative microbiological risk assessments and benchmarking data

Meta-analysis studies are increasingly being conducted in the food microbiology area to quantitatively integrate the findings of many individual studies on specific questions or kinetic parameters of interest. Meta-analyses provide global estimates of parameters and quantify their variabilities, and give insight into main influencing factors on parameters. This article discusses the opportunities of meta-analysis to generate sufficiently generic parameters – with their variability – for quantitative microbiological risk assessments, and demonstrates how the output of a meta-analysis can be used to benchmark future studies in order to position new data in perspective.