By Martin Banks - 20th September 2011
EFSA complies with the applicable legal framework in the recruitment of its experts
EFSA
Claims that officials advising an EU agency about the safety of food additives were guilty of a 'conflict of interest' have been dismissed.
The claims were made by the Corporate Europe Observatory and Réseau Environnement Santé.
They questioned the independence of Riccardo Crebelli and Ursula Gundert-Remy, two experts they said sat on the European food safety agency's scientific panel on food additives.
The alliance said the two experts had allegedly failed to declare consulting activities for the food industry-funded think tank and lobby group, the international life sciences institute (ILSI).
But, in a response on Tuesday, EFSA dismissed the claims and said that the allegations "contain a number of factual errors".
A detailed statement issued by EFSA's executive director Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle said, "Professor Crebelli was not a member of a scientific committee on the safety of food packaging set up by ILSI.
"He took part in a scientific committee of a conference, which screened abstracts and selected best papers and speakers for the conference organised by ILSI.
"In the end, professor Crebelli did not attend the conference in question.
"The topic of the conference was food packaging which does not fall within the remit of the ANS panel."
It went on, "Professor Gundert-Remy advised ILSI on general research topics, such as obesity, that also fall outside the scope of the ANS panel.
"Under EFSA's policy on declarations of interests, the experts are not required to declare these activities as they are not related to their scientific panel's field of activities and therefore cannot constitute potential conflicts of interest."
In a letter to the alliance, she said that EFSA "complies with the applicable legal framework in the recruitment of its experts".
She said that "EFSA's policy and rules on experts' declarations of interest are regularly subject to internal and external audits" and that "EFSA has imposed on its services a very high level of transparency", publishing on its website "all outputs and background documents, minutes of its working groups, conferences and events to prevent the occurrence of those conflicts".
