Dear Subscriber !

Welcome to the December issue of EVISA's Speciation Newsletter.

Mankinds capacity to change things based on scientific knowledge seems to be rather limited. One problem is that knowledge is not universal but a matter of discussion. Another point is that politicians and rulemakers are seldom basing their decision on science.   

For 8 years US Pharmacopeia (USP) was discussing what to do with a 100 years old method for heavy metal testing in pharmaceuticals that without doubt is no longer state-of-the-art ! The test, meant to assure safety of the consumer with respect to absence of toxic metal species in pharmaceuticals, is based on visual inspection of a sulfide precipitate. Unfortunately the method does not differentiate between metals, their species nor does it quantify their concentrations and therefore is not very informative. Indeed, the fact that the test never gave any alarming result during the last decades is challenging our confidence in  product safety. Now USP has triggered the long process of changing this procedure (see the News section). USP decided to build their new approach on a well established concept of the last century: determination of toxic metals by atomic spectrometry. Unfortunately such approach does not really recognize the decisive role of species with respect to toxicity. Anyhow, jumping directly into the 21st century is maybe too far for a first step after 100 years...

The next important meeting at which the state-of-the-art of atomic spectrometry and their role for speciation analysis will be discussed is the European Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, taking place February 15-20, 2009 in  Graz, Austria. The EVISA team will be present...

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous Year 2009.

Your EVISA team