Cereals & Grains Association
Log In

Development of the FAO Mycotoxin Sampling Tool to Evaluate Risks of Misclassifying Lots with Mycotoxin Sampling Plans 
T. WHITAKER (1) (1) North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, U.S.A..

It is important to be able to predict the number of good lots rejected (seller’s risk) and bad lots accepted (buyer’s risk) by a sampling plan design so that sampling plans can be designed to reduce one or both risks to acceptable levels for available resources. Using experimentally determined variability and distribution information among sample test results, a method was developed to calculate operating characteristic (OC) curves which provides a measures of the buyer’s and seller’s risks of a specific mycotoxin sampling plan design. The variability and distribution among sample test results have been studied for approximately 24 different mycotoxin/commodity combinations. The distribution and variance information for all 24 mycotoxin/commodity combinations were combined into a single model that calculates an OC curve for given sampling plan design elements such as sample size, number of samples, and the accept/reject limit. The OC calculator is currently supported online by FAO who has enhanced and improved the OC calculator using Analytica to make the model more user friendly. The OC calculator, currently called the FAO Mycotoxin Sampling Tool can be found on the web under FAO Food Safety Risk Analysis Tools http://www.fstools.org/. The FAO Mycotoxin Sampling Tool can compare the performance of up to 10 different mycotoxin sampling plan designs at one time.  By inputting the sampling plan design elements (sample size, number of samples, and accept/reject limit) into the FAO Mycotoxin Sampling Tool, the program will calculate the chances of accepting and rejecting lots over a range of lot concentrations (OC curve) for the sampling plan designs of interest. The OC calculator has been used to design mycotoxin sampling plans for regulatory agencies, commodity organizations, food and feed manufacturers, and international health organizations such as Codex.

View Presentation