This special issue of Food Additives and Contaminants dedicated to ‘Health Canada: Current Topics in Food Chemical Safety Research’ will be the first published document where the focus is on Health Canada's food research activities. This issue features a selection of papers arising from work in the Food Research Division of the Bureau of Chemical Safety within Health Canada's Food Directorate and their partners in the Health Canada's Regional Laboratories, in collaboration with international partners.
The papers covered in this issue deal with the determination of chemicals, such as brominated flame retardants, monochloropropanediols, melamine, bisphenol A, perchlorate and trace metals, but also with mycotoxins, phycotoxins and allergens that are introduced to foods either as a result of their occurrence in the environment, natural infection by fungi, food processing, food packaging or other human activities.
To deal with the increasing number of sample matrices and contaminants of interest, fast and accurate analytical methods are needed. This demand has led to the development of rapid screening methods for various analytes based on immunochemical techniques, including the use of surface plasmon resonance. Moreover, highly sophisticated multi-analyte methods based on liquid chromatography coupled with multiple-stage mass spectrometry have been developed to allow identification and simultaneous determination of a wide range of contaminants, and often with much less requirement for tedious clean-up procedures.
Thanks to the contributors, to whom we would like to express our great gratitude, recent developments in all the areas mentioned above can be presented in this issue. It is hoped that the collection of these papers stimulates further research the better to protect consumers through improved methods for the sensitive and accurate determination of contaminants in foods, which will also lead to improved exposure estimates and risk assessments.
We are also very thankful to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, John Gilbert, for his support and fantastic cooperation.