Experience of Introducing Advanced Methods of Food Safety and Quality Testing as Part of Ensuring State Sanitary and Epidemiological Surveillance

Abstract

Introduction: Development of a socially oriented state in a modern dynamic and ever changing world necessitates improvement of control and inspection in the sphere of food security, the most important element of which is laboratory testing. Objective: To analyze the experience of introducing advanced methods of food safety and quality testing into the current system of state sanitary and epidemiological surveillance. Materials and methods: We analyzed 92 information materials, 1,110 test reports, 18 organizational and administrative docu- ments, and 18 guidelines issued by the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing and the Federal Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology and its affiliates in constituent entities of the Russian Federation on laboratory testing of food products in the years 2017–2021 within execution of orders of the Russian government. We used methods of statistical observation, data grouping, and comparative analysis of absolute and relative values. Results: In 2017–2021, efforts for improvement of food safety and quality testing were focused on detection of residual antimicrobial agents, detection and identification of undeclared and potentially hazardous unintentionally present or added substances, and food quality monitoring. Reference laboratory centers equipped with modern high-precision equipment have been established for each of the directions and new methods have been developed and introduced. We observed a 9.4-fold increase in the number of tests for undeclared substances and antimicrobials in foods (from 20,002 in 2017 to 188,698 in 2021) and a 6.4-fold increase in the total number of samples tested (from 4,014 to 25,611). The number of tests performed using HPLC-MS/MS and the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay increased by 32 and 4.2 times, respectively. We noted a 3.2-fold increase in the number of samples found to contain undeclared and potentially hazardous unintentionally present substances. Conclusion: Supplying reference laboratory centers with modern high-precision equipment, developing, certifying and imple- menting new methods of testing, expanding the range of reference materials in the years 2017–2021 enabled effective detection and identification of undeclared and potentially hazardous unintentionally present/added substances, residual amounts of antimicrobial drugs, and effective food quality monitoring in all regions of the Russian Federation.