ASSESSMENT OF RASFF NOTIFICATIONS CONCERNING SEAFOOD DURING THE YEAR 2008

The RASFF provides a useful database on food and hazard types and countries of origin. We focused on all of the weekly overviews during the year 2008 containing tables with data of seafood alert and information notifications and border rejections. Data have been parsed into an Excel spreadsheet file and stored into the following column headings: seafood, food preservation, reason for notifying or rejection, country of origin, reference number. Relationships between product and hazard categories, way of storing, country of origin have been assessed. The results have been shown by means of graphs. The aim of this paper is making a database with specific informations on seafood and correlated hazards and country of origin available for both studying historical trends and predicting future risks.