The requirements of 16 CFR 1500.121 relating to the prominence and conspicuousness of precautionary labeling statements for hazardous substances shall apply to any labeling statement required under § 1500.19(b) and (f), with the following clarifications and modifications.
If the descriptive material contains instructions for use, the required precautionary labeling shall be in reasonable proximity to such instructions or directions and shall be placed together within the same general area (see 16 CFR 1500.121(c)(6)).
This regulation is designed to facilitate management of children with food allergies attending school, although the readability of the allergen list requires further improvement and use of precautionary labelling must be more clearly circumscribed.
Boelhouwer and colleagues [80] illustrated in two US surveys that hazard and precautionary labels may improve risk communications.
Part of Mills's job is to provide scientific data to regulatory agencies such as the U.K. Food Standards Agency, which uses the information to assist the clinical community and allergic consumers in issuing and understanding precautionary labels.
Precautionary labeling (e.g. "may contain") is in widespread use as a result of this approach.
The results of this study have shown that precautionary labelling practices of commercial oats vary greatly (Table 2).
This study also showed that voluntary precautionary labelling was used on roughly half of the products tested and in some cases the statement was inadequate.
Muñoz-Furlong believes that the next step in the development of allergen labeling should be to create binding guidelines for what is currently the voluntary use of "precautionary labeling," which warns of the possibility that an allergen might be present as the result of shared production processes.
With few data on low-dose effects of arsenic, Kelvin took an approach we would today label "precautionary": "In the absence of fuller knowledge than is at present available, we are not prepared to allow that it would be right to declare any quantity of arsenic, however small, as admissible in beer or in any food".
Additionally, because the EPA requires precautionary language on labels for all products containing chlorpyrifos, those who worked directly with manufacturing the birdseeds should have known that use in birdseed was illegal, unless they were either illiterate or blind.
