Agilent Technologies has announced it will host two seminars at the Dioxin 2014 International Symposium in Madrid, Spain. Food safety experts Dr Peter Fürst, of Germany's Chemical and Veterinary Analytical Institute (CVUA-MEL), and Dr Jean-François (Jef) Focant, professor of organic and biological analytical chemistry at the University of Liège, will present data pertaining to recent dioxin screening and confirmation regulations enacted by the European Commission. Seminars will be conducted Monday, Sept. 1, and Thursday, Sept. 4.
The announcement comes just as EC regulations have changed to include provisions for validating triple quadrupole GC/MS technology as a confirmatory method for identifying dioxins, furans (PCDD/Fs) and dioxin-like PCBs (DL-PCBs) in food and animal feed (EC No. 589/2014 and 709/2014, respectively).
“This new legislation represents an important step in further protecting the global food chain through the ability of more labs to perform testing,” said Focant. “In our lab we have already proven that a method applied on an Agilent 7000C Triple Quadrupole GC/MS System meets official EC requirements for the confirmatory analysis of PCDD/Fs and DL-PCBs in vegetable oil. The validation will be extended to other matrices in the near future.”
