Project to speed up feed testing
Prof Chris Elliott, director of the Institute of Agri-Food and Land Use at Queens, will lead a team of scientists in developing new techniques to detect chemical contaminants in human and animal food.
The €4.5 million European project will cover a wide range of foods including meat, poultry, milk, seafood and cereals.
Called the Confidence Project, it will provide long-term solutions to contamination from pesticides, organic pollutants, veterinary pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics and plant and natural toxins.
Contaminated feed was blamed for the high levels of potentially cancer-causing dioxins found in Irish pork.
Prof Elliott said the presence of chemical contaminants in food was a major concern for both European governments and consumers, as was seen with the pork scare across Ireland in recent days.
“Thankfully, the presence of contaminants in food are fatal in only a small number of cases. However, the effects of long-term exposure to these toxins are far from clear and may present significant health risks,” he said.
Prof Elliott said regulatory authorities and the food industries were spending a lot of money monitoring and controlling the safety of food products and animal feed and expensive methods that could only detect one chemical were often used in the monitoring process.
“There is an urgent need to replace 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,” he said.
The Confidence project, is coordinated by the RIKILT Institute of Food Safety in the Netherlands and involves 17 partners from 10 European countries.
The project has been designed to provide long-term solutions to the monitoring of a wide variety of chemical contaminants.
New technology will be used, including dip-stick tests used in the same way as pregnancy tests, as well as low-cost high-volume laboratory-based methods.
