Articles -

Do we know how many people suffer from food allergies?        The socio-economic impact of food allergies  Allergy-related health loss is estimated to be of the same order of magnitude as prostate cancer or rheumatoid arthritis and it may be more severe than that of heart disease, skin cancer, or Parkinson’s disease ( [...]

European Union, USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zelando: an update      Abstract  As part of an EU-funded project (FP7) to develop “Integrated approaches to food allergen and allergy management”, a database was constructed from publicly available information on allergen recalls between 2011 and 2014 in Eur [...]

Product labeling is uneven in different countries and, even at the European level, legislation has gaps both for food producers and for consumers. Some countries, such as the UK, are moving to implement new national legislation.     Introduction  According to the final RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) report for 2018 (Eur [...]

 Standardization of methods could soon be easier. Introduction Effective food allergen risk assessment and food allergen management are important to protect allergic consumers and to comply with allergen labeling regulations. Such approaches require reliable analytical tools for the detection of allergens in food. Due to the nature of the analyt [...]

ELISA kits can hardly be considered quantitative and LFDs play a key role in the food industry but performance is rarely documented.     Regulatory environment  EU Regulation No 1169/2011 specifies fourteen substances or products causing allergens or intolerances for which food labeling is mandatory when they are known ingredients. I [...]

FDA is increasing its efforts to enforce FSMA. “Cross-contact” must be controlled in items exported to the US. Rapid methods play a key role in the Allergen Control Plans of manufacturers. New regulations for private third-party food laboratory accreditation are expected soon.The authors of the recently published “Prevalence and Severity of F [...]

Comparing food producers and caterers: what differences exist for managing allergens?  The majority of food allergens so far studied show common features: they are low molecular weight proteins (10-70 kd) and they are stable in the presence of heat, proteases, and acid. Allergic reactions are relatively dose-independent and there is great variabi [...]

The point of view of the test kit manufacturers. Service laboratories and industries, as well as governmental bodies, rely on ELISA kits for the detection of food allergens. Recently, a number of guidelines for the validation of ELISA methods for detecting allergens have been issued by the analytical chemistry community (AOAC) and by technical bod [...]

Laboratories primarily use ELISA kits and while sensitivity is considered satisfactory, recoveries in some matrices are not – opinions diverge about thresholds and the need for multiplex methods.The allergen testing laboratory point of view is interesting because laboratories operate between test kit manufacturers and food businesses. Allergen te [...]

At the beginning of my career in the in-vitro diagnostic industry, I was attending a seminar in Milan on biosensors for the agri-food industry. It was 1988 or so. Many speakers told us that biosensor technology was going to allow the food industry to rapidly detect any kind of contaminant. I was impressed. As a young biotechnologist busy with ELISA [...]