Antibiotic Residues Testing and its Validation in Food and Feed Webinar
Antibiotics are used globally by the livestock industry to prevent and treat infectious bacterial diseases, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said on its website. Fluoroquinolones are antibiotics that are commonly used to treat a variety of illnesses in veterinary medicine while salinomycin is used in chicken feed to fight parasites. Nonetheless, poultry treated with antibiotics “may not be processed for food until a specified withdrawal period has been observed to allow antibiotic residues to be sufficiently cleared from the system”. The SFA prescribes maximum residue levels (MRLs) “so that we know the chicken we buy is safe for consumption”, said William Chen, the director of Nanyang Technological University’s food science and technology programme. There is a strict inspection scheme to ensure that drug residues do not exceed those levels, the professor added.
"Veterinary drugs are not permitted in food including prawns and shrimps. Affected prawns found to contain veterinary drug residues...would not be allowed to be imported or sold," an AVA spokesman said. Singapore's Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) told The Straits Times that it has not detected veterinary drug residues such as nitrofurans and amphenicols in prawns and shrimps from Malaysia. Supermarkets here said their suppliers carry out checks on shrimps and prawns imported from Malaysia to ensure food safety. NTUC FairPrice, Cold Storage and Giant said they also diversify their sources of shrimps and prawns by importing from other countries. FairPrice said this is to ensure that it is "not reliant on one single source of supply".
In light of the importance of continuous testing of antibiotics residues, we have recently organised another webinar in November 2021 entitled “Analysis of Antibiotic Residues in Food & Feed and Its Validation”. The objective of the webinar was to share methods available for screening and identification of antibiotics residues on PremiTest and Enzyme-Linked Immunoassay (ELISA), performing validation in accordance with CRL guidelines, how detection capability (CcBeta) works and why is it more important than LOD and LOQ in a test kit, reference materials and proficiency test (PT) rounds. The topics were presented by Mr Marco Oteman, Product Manager of EuroProxima and Trilogy Portfolio, and Dr Thomas Nick, Product Manager for Hormones and Antibiotics Portfolio. The audience gained more insights to antibiotics residues testing and validation, which includes samples preparation protocols and results interpretations.
We would like to wish all our customers and business partners a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2022.
References:
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cnainsider/antibiotic-free-range-organic-chicken-poultry-feed-cause-concern-958951 https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-traces-of-banned-antibiotics-in-shrimps-and-prawns-from-malaysia-in-singapore-ava
