European Union other chemical contaminants

In 1982, the European Union s Council Directive 82/501/EEC on the major-accident hazards of certain industrial activities, also known as the Seveso Directive, was adopted. The Directive was mostly designed to promote information flow and created the requirement that each Member State (i.e., each country belonging to the European Union) appoint a Competent Authority to oversee safety issues. The Seveso Directive was amended twice, following major accidents at the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, India in 1984 (a leak of methyl isocyanate caused thousands of deaths), and at the Sandoz chemical warehouse in Basel, Switzerland in 1986 (fire-fighting water contaminated with mercury, organophosphate pesticides and other chemicals caused massive pollution of the Rhine River and the death of hundreds of thousands of fish). Both amendments, broadened the scope of the Directive, in particular to include the storage of dangerous substances. 

There are many chemical contaminants that may be present in a vast array of different foodstuffs. This highlights the need for an extremely flexible, sensitive, and rapid analytical methodology capable of detection of multianalyte in various food samples. Such systems should be capable of detecting the residues of the parent compound and its metabolites in various sample matrices. This may be facilitated in the future by multiplex antibody microarrays, possibly integrated with label-free methods. Flowever, within the European Union (EU) there is no obligation to use standardized methods in residue control studies on food-producing animals. Techniques are required to satisfy new performance characteristics, limits, and other criteria, opening the door for modern analytical approaches such as antibody microarrays [42]. 

European Union Directive 98/83 underlines the importance of determining the quality of drinking water in order to protect human health. In particular, a number of chemical compounds are listed, such as benzene, 1,2-dichloroethane, tetrachloroeth-ylene, chloroform, and trihalomethanes, whose concentration in drinking water must be kept under well-defined thresholds. In Italy, laws DL 31/01, DM 152/99, and DM 471/99 set the norms for the concentrations of these, and of many other compounds in drinking water, wastewater, and contaminated sites, respectively. 

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