At 20 years of age, Reading Scientific Services (RSSL) may not quite have the key to the door, but it's got the key to pretty much everything else. The group has moved a long way from its roots in shelf-life testing to prevent microbe spoilage. Now claims substantiation is its focal point and it invests vast amounts of time testing functional ingredients to make sure they're all they're cracked up to be.

In August, US scientists announced that they had developed the first step on the way to producing portable detectors for a variety of nasty pathogens such as anthrax and smallpox, as well as food bugs.

Oxoid has extended its range of rapid tests for the detection of Salmonella in foods to include the DuPont Lateral Flow System test kit.

The Food Titrino from Metrohm is a compact titration system offering a complete package for titration analyses in the food industry. Almost 100 determination methods are described in detail and the system uses a liquid crystal display screen for real-time display of titration curves.

Life sciences company EBI Food Safety has established what it claims is the West's first facility for the industrial scale production of bacteriophages for killing food-borne bacteria.

The Labguard2 from Don Whitley Scientific is a wireless system that continuously monitors laboratory equipment and automatically alerts the operator to any problems. Easy to use and install it provides the data required for compliance with laboratory regulations including those of the US Food and Drug Administration and Good Laboratory Practice.

Reading Scientific Services (RSSL) has added a saliva test to its foreign body identification service. The forensic test, based on detecting the presence or absence of enzymes found in saliva, can be used as a confirmation or challenge to customers who claim to have taken a foreign body into their mouths. The same test can also be used to confirm, for example, whether customers have drunk directly from a bottle, a factor that may also be relevant in substantiating a customer complaint.