Foreword Vol.2 Nr.2

First of all, I want to express my joy to be here again. Italy, as you all certainly know, was the first Western country affected by Covid-19 after the outbreak in China. At this point, we have had 35 000 deaths in Italy and for a few weeks in some parts of northern Italy hospitals had difficulties caring for all of the sick people. The lockdown, the use of masks, and other rules helped us become nearly free of Covid-19 in about 2 months. Of course, we faced some difficulties gathering the papers for this issue. We are late, but we are here, with the same enthusiasm we had before and with some new ideas.

This issue of Affidia is a monograph about mycotoxins. Rivers of ink have been spilled on this topic, often just repeating what was already well-known. We tried to avoid this. We have several papers that report facts that have been rarely or never presented, like the good job done by Iran to improve the quality of pistachio production or the opinions of test strip users about test kits and service laboratories. We also include other papers that cast light on the mycotoxin problem from little-known perspectives, including one about recall management and another about penalties or legal cases that can arise from mycotoxin non-compliancy.

The last 2 papers are classical scientific reviews, although shorter than the common standard. One helps us understand ochratoxin A risk, taking into account the findings of the most recent EFSA Scientific Report. The other review is about multiplex immunoassays for mycotoxins. I think that the demand for multi-analyte testing will grow in the next years and that the screening cannot be managed any longer by the monoplex methods currently available.

The presence of two reviews is the beginning of an evolution for Affidia. Beginning in 2021, we will move the magazine to a digital platform with a new graphical style where we will also publish original research papers. We will call this new edition Affidia JFD (Journal of Food Diagnostics). Scientific papers will concentrate on analytical methods, with special care for new technologies that are ready to be industrialized or that are based on new ways to use existing instrumentation or binding assays.

At the same time, we will launch Affidia Reviews, special issues dedicated to a single food commodity, supply chain, analytical method, or control issue. Some examples? “Analytical errors and analytical fraud in the food testing market”, “Coffee: How to guarantee quality in the era of ‘free from’”, and “Food supplements: contamination and fraud”. Affidia Reviews will mostly publish reviews along with a very limited number of short opinion papers.

I hope you enjoy our work and I invite all of you to send me comments or proposals. The call for both original research papers and reviews is now open.

Take care.