Contribution of European research to anti-microbials and hormones Original Research Article

The EC Quality of Life (QoL) Programme, Key Action 1 (KA1)—Food, Nutrition and Health is mission oriented and aims, amongst other things, at providing a healthy, safe and high-quality food supply leading to reinforced consumer confidence in the safety of European food. Its objectives also include the enhancing of competitiveness of European industry and ensuring the safety of the European food supply. Key Action 1 is currently supporting a number of different types of European collaborative projects in the area of anti-microbial and hormone residue analysis. The objectives of these projects range from the development and validation of screening and confirmatory analytical methods and sensors for a cost-effective and time efficient control strategy for synthetic glucocorticoids, nitrofurans including their possible bound residues, coccidiostatics, β-lactam residues, and androgen residues in live and post-mortem animals; via contributing to a harmonisation of risk assessment of chemicals in foods; and a bio-safety evaluation of probiotic lactic acid bacteria (LAB) used for human consumption in order to detect resistance and horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes among LAB. An overview of these projects including their initial results is presented in this paper.