Dear Colleagues,

Please find enclosed the report of the EURL representatives to the annual plenary meetings of ISO/TC 34/SC 9 and CEN/TC 275/WG 6, dealing with international and European standardization in food microbiology, which were held in Washington DC last June. Resolutions/recommendations taken are also appended.

I have represented EURL MMP at these meetings.

To note in particular for the ISO meeting:

Dear Colleagues,

We are organising in 2014 for the NRLs for Milk and Milk Products a training session on somatic cell counting in raw cow’s milk by the reference method 13366-1. It will take place in our laboratory in Maisons-Alfort from 27 November at 9:00 to 28 November 2014 at 15:00.

Dear colleagues,

We have good news to announce to you: recently, the Institute of Reference Materials & Measurements (IRMM) of EC/Joint Research Centre, Geel (BE) has decided to launch the project of certification of reference materials for somatic cell count (SCC) in milk, in collaboration with EURL MMP and ISO/IDF/ICAR.

Dear Colleagues,

At the last annual workshops, we have kept you informed of the progress made in the certification (third-party validation) of the instrumental methods (Bactoscan and Bactocount) for the quantification of total flora in raw milk. This certification is undertaken by the certification body MicroVal (http://www.microval.org/), and the expert laboratory for the validation of these two methods is Qlip (NL).