Safer food through rapid and cost-efficient tests for detecting chemical contaminants in food and animal feed. This is the major goal of a new European research project called CONff IDENCE. The project will be coordinated by RIKILT – Institute of Food Safety, part of Wageningen UR, The Netherlands.
One of the major concerns of European governments and consumers is the presence of chemical contaminants in food. Consequently, Regulatory Authorities and the food/ feed industries spend large budgets to monitor and control the safety of both food products and animal feed. This monitoring often uses expensive methods that can only detect one specific chemical. There is therefore an urgent need for replacement of current methods by validated screening tools, which are simple, inexpensive and rapid and are able to detect as many chemical contaminants in parallel as possible.
The CONff IDENCE project has been designed to provide long-term solutions to the monitoring of a wide variety of chemical contaminants. These include pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, veterinary pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, heavy metals, plant and shellfish toxins and mycotoxins. Tests will be developed and validated for products such as fish and fish feed, cereal-based food/feed and vegetables. A balanced mix of novel technologies will be utilized. These include dipstick tests that can be used in the same way as pregnancy tests, and low-cost laboratory-based high-throughput methods.
After completion, the simplified methods will be used to perform international food surveys that will contribute to measurement of consumer exposure to chemical contaminants. Moreover, the tests will be used to study the transfer of harmful contaminants from feed to eggs and meat. The CONff IDENCE consortium consists of 17 partners from 10 European countries. The project will be financially supported by the European Community and national governments and has a duration of 4 years.
Website: www.conffidence.eu
Contact: coordination@conffidence.eu, Jacob de Jong +31317 480376