Articles - Point Of View

The food chain, or at least most food sectors, has shown over the last two years an incredible resilience in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, with seemingly fewer outbreaks of foodborne illness despite operating difficulties due to labour shortages. Yet in the last three months, outbreaks in the United States (Cronobacter spp. in powdered infant [...]

When I was asked to write this piece for Affidia Journal’s Special Issue dedicated to the 2022 World Mycotoxin Forum, the first thing that came to my mind was the association between Pandemic - Mycotoxin - Speed. It may seem strange to you, but you will soon see how the three are closely interconnected. The evolution of analytical methods for [...]

Some analytical scientists report an analytical result and others report a result and its interpretation. There are good reasons for doing the former. The complexity of modern analytical science requires specialisation; it is often safer for the specialist to report just a result. It must be properly described with unambiguous units, a brief inform [...]

Food fraud (FF) that generates monetary gains is also known as Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA). It is a widespread practice that undermines not only food authenticity, but also food safety due to the potential presence of toxic or undeclared adulterants. Increasingly accurate and sensitive authentication methods, including a variety of sp [...]

Since early 2021, we have stopped seeing the numerous recalls triggered by the presence of ethylene oxide (EO) in ingredients and food products. Quite “surprisingly”, a lot of certified organic food products were implicated in these recalls, and so-called locally-made foods have turned out to contain very non-local ingredients. But is it really [...]

No topic dominated the media in 2020 like the COVID-19 pandemic.After endless deliberation over infec- tion counts and challenges to national health systems, public debate turned to controversial government-mandated containment measures to reduce COV- ID-19 transmission, such as wearing face masks, social distancing, and curfews. But for those resp [...]

Analytical science, both in chemistry and microbiology, has seen a drastic technical evolution in recent years. It’s possible to test for analytes with very little knowledge about them. And this is where things start to get difficult. Just because one can test for something, should one test for it? And why? Which actions, if any, should be taken [...]

We now know that we live our whole lives under a rain of hazardous chemicals. But there is a period in our lives when this exposure can create even more problems. It is when we are developing in our mothers’ wombs and when we are breastfeeding. Not only can our development be hindered but that exposure can increase the probability that we will co [...]

I will never forget the face of a lab manager in a tech meeting who reported the very high CV she measured after using a certified ELISA kit. The kit was not certified for the material she had tested. Nor will I ever forget that several feed industries have a museum of LFD readers (each brand requiring its own reader, of course) because they couldn [...]

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 [...]