23 luglio 2009

New European standards for ALLERGENS

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) has recently issued two new standards for the detection of food allergens...

...both developed by the technical committee CEN/TC 275 “Food analysis – Horizontal methods”. The standards are thought to uniform the allergen analysis in foodstuff across Europe. Parameters laid down in this European Standard (EN) are intended to ensure comparability and reproducibility of results obtained in different laboratories. The aim of this was to increase the safety of the allergic persons, assuring performances of methods used in such analysis. The available methods for allergens detection are the immunological (e.g. ELISA) and molecular biological (e.g. PCR) ones.
The EN 15633-1: 2009 “Foodstuffs - Detection of food allergens by immunological methods - Part 1: General considerations” states the general guidelines and performance criteria for antibody-based methods (immunological methods), used to detect and quantify proteins that are used as markers for the presence of allergenic foods or food ingredients.
The EN 15634-1: 2009 “Foodstuffs - Detection of food allergens by molecular biological methods - Part 1: General considerations” relates to the requirements for the specific amplification of target nucleic acid sequences and for the confirmation of the identity of the same ones.

Link:

http://www.cen.eu/cenorm/news/spotlight+on+standards/archive/foodallergies.asp