The World Health Organization considers the antibiotic resistance as one of the three greatest threats to human health for the next decades.
The great benefit of antibiotics in animal production makes the farm sector the major user of these medicines creating a high risk to find contaminated food with antibiotic residues. Since the EU has strong regulations in this aspect, this can cause negative consequences to the dairy industry and public health: 1. High economical loses due to milk destruction by incineration and penalties; 2. Big technological problems to companies manufacturing fermented foods; 3. Public health issues related to antibiotic resistances.
According to EU legislation all food operators are responsible for food safety. Unfortunately, the majority of food controls are done at food plants or laboratories. So, there are limited opportunities for the milk sector to manage food risks on-site and in real-time.
ZEULAB has developed a novel antibiotic residues detection system. Test4all is the first automatic system that makes the results available in real time. These unique features allow farmers to do easy self-controls before supplying the milk and to dairies to screen antibiotics during the milk transport in trucks or upon arrival at the plant. Test4all is based on a small portable device that makes an easy biological test. This device is managed by a smartphone App connected to a secure internet cloud. So, farmers and dairies will be always connected, having their results at anytime and anywhere.
There are 600.000 farmers and 12.000 milk plants in Europe. This solution will highly benefit the dairy sector and society by:
• Saving high costs on management of non-compliance milk (transport, cross contamination, destruction)
• Increasing the milk production yield at farms by a strict control of treated animals.
• Avoiding penalties to farmers.
• Reducing food risks and increasing the food quality
• Helping to fight against antibiotic resistance.
The overall objectives of the project were:
• Miniaturize a portable device, create a smartphone App to manage the system and design an internet secure network to access results in real time.
• Design the first individual assay adapted to non-laboratory users.
• Validate and certificate the system by international reference organizations.
• Scale-up the industrial production of the system
• Develop a dissemination and exploitation plan to promote the benefits of Test4all
