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Bertrand Lombard and Alexandre Leclercq
of products. As regards to STEC, a foodborne pathogen causing a rare but severe kidney illness in young children (hemolytic and uremic syndrome – HUS), the first and most difficult step has been to define the precise target of the future reference method. The target (i.e. the main five STEC serogroups involved in foodborne illnesses) was defined at the 2008 WG 6 meeting and the principle of the method, based on real-time PCR, was determined: a first step consists in STEC PCR screening, and if positive, a second step of PCR detection of the main five serogroups involved in foodborne illnesses, especially HUS (O26, O103, O111, O145 and O157); and if positive, a third step of confirmation, by colony isolation and characterization. The development of standard reference methods for the detection of foodborne viruses is of utmost importance: despite the significance of viruses in public health linked to food (a high number of gastroenteritis cases due to foodborne viruses), no regulatory controls have been established due to the absence of standardized reference methods. In that field, analytical development is still required before standards can be written. It was recently decided (2007) to launch standardization works in the field of foodborne parasites, on Trichinella under WG 6 leadership, to meet the needs of European regulation, on Giardia and Cryptosporidium under SC 9 leadership, based on methods already developed and validated in the UK. A criticism often heard, especially in North America, is that these standard methods have not been fully validated by a proper collaborative study. Due to the living nature of the analyte, the organization of such studies is particularly difficult and costly in food microbiology, thus this delay. To overcome it, a project funded by the European Commission, Standard, Measurement and Testing Programme was conducted in 1996–2000, during which seven main standard methods were fully validated: enumeration of Bacillus cereus, enumeration of coagulase-positive staphylococci (two methods), enumeration of Clostridium perfringens, detection and enumeration of Listeria monocytogenes, and detection of Salmonella (Lahellec, 1998). In addition, the European Commission recently gave CEN/TC 275/WG 6 an ambitious mandate to further validate 15 standard horizontal methods. This mandate is to be signed in the coming months before validation studies can be launched.
III.B. Standards on general aspects There is a set of CEN/ISO standards that deals with the general aspects related to microbiological analysis of food, as shown in Table 12.4. The following topics are covered, also taking into account the current standardization works: 1. Good laboratory practices (GLP) in food microbiology (ISO 7218). This standard gathers common aspects of the horizontal standards developed