QALIBRA Final activity report / Final Report QALIBRA
This report is the final report of the European project QALIBRA or “Quality of Life - Integrated Benefit and Risk Analysis. Webbased tool for assessing food safety and health benefits ”or QALIBRA - Heilsuvogin in Icelandic. Matís ohf managed the project, which was partly funded by the European Union, with a total of seven participants from six countries. The project began on April 1, 2006 and formally ended on December 31, 2009, but the final completion lasted until 2010. This report describes the main results, benefits and results of the project. The aim of the QALIBRA project was to develop quantitative methods to assess both the positive and negative effects of food ingredients on human health. When we eat food, we get both negative and positive elements in the body and until now, food risk assessment has been limited to examining the effects of individual substances on living beings (eg experimental animals). The QALIBRA project developed methods that take into account both the negative and positive aspects of food consumption and evaluate the overall impact of the risks and benefits on human health as well as the uncertainty of the assessment. These methods have been presented in a computer program that is open and accessible to all stakeholders free of charge on the project's website http://www.qalibra.eu. The methods were tested on two types of food, ie fish and target foods.
This is the final report to the commission from the “QALIBRA - Quality of life - integrated benefit and risk analysis. Web - based tool for assessing food safety and health benefits ”project. QALIBRA was an EU 6th Framework project with seven partners, conducted between 1st April 2006 and 31st December 2009, although the finalization of project was accomplished in year 2010. In this report the objectives, main work performed and achievements of the project to the state‐ of ‐ the ‐ art are summarized. To assess the balance between the risks and benefits associated with a particular food, they must be converted into a common measure of net health impact. Uncertainties affecting the risks and benefits cause uncertainty about the magnitude and even the direction of the net health impact. QALIBRA has developed methods that can take into account multiple risks, benefits and uncertainties and implemented them in a web ‐ based software for assessing and communicating net health impacts. The methods and software developed by QALIBRA were used to carry out detailed case studies on the benefits and risks of oily fish and functional foods. The software developed (QALIBRA tool) in the project to assess and integrate beneficial and adverse effects of foods is freely available on the website of the project http://www.qalibra.eu.