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Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only Publication Acceptance Date: 4/1/1998 Publication Date: N/A Citation: N/A Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: Foods for human consumption are not permitted to contain violative levels of pesticide residues or other chemical contaminants. Within the U.S., state and federal regulatory agencies maintain monitoring and enforcement programs to ensure compliance by the agricultural and food industries. The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) of 1996 emphasizes the use of quantitative risk assessment of the effects of pesticide residues on human health. One of the many mandates of the FQPA is that the EPA must re-evaluate the tolerances of all pesticides in agricultural commodities using new risk assessment criteria. The accuracy of the risk assessment, and the associated regulatory tolerance level which is set, depends on the quality of the data. For this reason, a greater emphasis has been placed on assuring the quality of the analytical results. Regulatory agency and industrial laboratories have been challenged to meet increased expectations for ensuring food safety during a time of personnel downsizing and flat or declining laboratory budgets. The analytical method development research conducted in the Environmental Chemistry Lab strives to help laboratories meet these seemingly conflicting goals. Novel analytical approaches developed in the Lab using technologies such as supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), solid-phase extraction (SPE), ion-trap mass spectrometry (ITMS), capillary electrophoresis (CE), and immunochemical techniques have been demonstrated to reduce laboratory expenses and provide other advantages over traditional analytical methods. |
