5. Quality control
Accreditation to the ISO 17025 standard is mandatory for food
control laboratories, and most (if not all) laboratories claiming
competency in the field of target food contaminant analysis are
thus accredited. Proficiency testing schemeswere introduced some
years ago [31] to allow laboratories to assess their performance
in comparison to their peer group and, if necessary, to improve
the performance of methodology. Such schemes work well for the
assessment of competency in the measurement of established food
contaminants, but they are generally not available to support analytical
methods for emerging or new classes of contaminants. For
newclasses of contaminant, alternative approaches to method validation
and quality control [32] can depend upon the ingenuity of