How can the principles of validation and verification be applied to hazardanalysis?

The acceptance of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) as the foo d safety control system of choice by the food industry, governments and reg ulatory bodies with responsibility for food safety, has lead to the prolife ration of HACCP plans on a world wide basis. The adoption of the Coder Alim entarius text (Alinorm 97/13A) as the authoritative text on Principles and Guidelines for HACCP has contributed significantly to a more harmonised app roach and agreed terminology, but there is still some lack of clarity over the specific activities of validation and verification. A logical interpret ation of the Coder text would lead one to believe that validation is primar ily concerned with those activities that evaluate the scientific and techni cal content of the HACCP plan, whereas verification focuses primarily on pr ocedures required to determine compliance with an operational HACCP system. Using the above criteria this paper looks at the application of validation and verification to the HACCP Principle of Hazard Analysis. Hazard Analysis is concerned primarily with the identification of hazards t hat are of such a nature that they must be controlled to ensure safe food a nd must therefore be included in the HACCP plan. As such Hazard Analysis is probably the key HACCP Principle. The paper proposes mechanisms to validat e the identification of hazards for inclusion in the HACCP Plan and conclud es that validation in particular has a very important role to play in provi ding both scientific and technical support for hazard selection as well as providing focus for the subsequent development of the HACCP plan. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.