FAO plans WGS meeting; The WHO wants data on aflatoxin

The opportunity to participate in a meeting on Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) for food safety and water monitoring is open.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will host the event in May 2025 in Rome, Italy, to bring together government officials, public health professionals, researchers and other stakeholders.

The FAO selects participants based on certain criteria. People interested in the conference must apply before November 4. Successful applicants will be notified in January 2025.

The FAO Agrifood Systems and Food Safety Division has several ongoing initiatives in WGS for food safety management. Through partnerships with regulatory agencies and academic institutions, technical and policy documents have been developed to support capacity development, especially for low- and middle-income countries.

The objectives of the event include raising awareness of the benefits of using WGS for food safety and water management at the national level, discussing data generation and sharing, and forming a task force to develop evidence-based data and gather information to produce a white paper that illustrates where we are and what needs to be done to improve human and water health.

Applicants who have ongoing initiatives, partnerships or projects with FAO and regulatory officials working in the areas of food safety and water monitoring will be given priority.

WHO data calls
In other news, the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued two calls for data on aflatoxins.

The first concerns the total number of aflatoxins in grains and grain-based products. This includes corn kernels, flour, semolina, semolina and flakes derived from corn, dehulled and polished rice, and sorghum grains for further processing.

At a recent meeting of the Codex Committee on Contaminants in Foods, the Secretariat of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) was asked to issue a call for data on aflatoxins in cereals and cereal-based products , including nutrition for infants and young children.

Information is requested about the country of origin, the condition of the food analyzed and the limits of detection and quantification of analytical methods.

The second call concerns data on the total aflatoxins in ready-to-eat peanuts.

Data collected using methods with a quantitation limit of 4 μg/kg or less are required. Data on the occurrence of total aflatoxins must come from the past ten years.

All new data must be uploaded to the Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) database by October 31, 2024.

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