Nutrition and food safety

TOPIC

Nutrition and food safety

Microbiological food safety

Microbiological food safety includes all activities associated with the identification and characterization of microbiological hazards (both pathogenic bacteria and viruses), as the development of analytical methodologies and sampling plans, and the adequate levels of self-control plans among food business operators.

The Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, the National Institute of Health in Italy) develops and guarantees those activities through its national reference laboratories and centres.

The ISS also evaluates the microbiological risk in all food productive chain and guarantees determination by a third party in case of a controversy on compliance of food with legal requirements for microbiological criteria.



Back Training at the EURL-VTEC

The EURL-VTEC offers laboratory training for the staff of the NRLs of EU Member States or third countries. All the training sessions are based on a hands-on approach and consist in visits to the EURL-VTEC of trainees interested in improving their knowledge about methodologies and techniques for pathogenic E. coli detection, identification, and typing. A dedicated budget from the European Commission is usually allocated to support visits of scientists from EU-NRLs and each year the EURL launches a call to collect applications from the NRLs.
Different training programs are currently available at the Training at the EURL-VTEC section of the website and also reported below. 
 
- Program for a 5-days training on the detection of VTEC in food matrices according to the ISO TS 13136:2012 and the characterization of the isolated VTEC strains (EU-RL VTEC_Training Program_ISOTS13136_Rev 3)

- Program for a 4-days training on the identification and characterization of the different groups of pathogenic E. coli by Real Time PCR amplification of their virulence genes (EU-RL VTEC_Training Program_Identification of pathogenic E. coli_Rev 2)

- Program for a 5-days training on molecular typing of VTEC by PFGE (EU-RL VTEC_Training Program_PFGE typing_Rev 2)

- Program for a 5-days training on the design and preparation of PTs on the detection of VTEC in food matrices (EU-RL VTEC_Training Program_PT organization _Rev 1)

- Program for a 3-days training on the use of bioinformatics tools for Next Generation Sequencing data mining for typing pathogenic E. coli (EURL-VTEC_Training Program_Bioinformatics_Rev 0) [PDF - 120.32 kbytes]

 

In the same section are also available the documents related to:

- Basic Course on the use of BioNumerics Software for the analysis of Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis-generated profiles of E. coli (Rome, 12-13 June 2014)

- Second Joint Training Course on the Use of BioNumerics Software to analyse PFGE data of Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli, Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes (Rome, 3-4 July 2017)
 


Dipartimenti/Centri/Servizi

Departments Food safety, nutrition and veterinary public health

Target

Healthcare professional

Content type

Document

Topics

Nutrition and food safety Food-borne diseases Microbiological food safety Veterinary public health Zoonoses