Laboratory personnel at the Seychelles Bureau of Standards (SBS) and the Seychelles Public Health Laboratory (SPHL) underwent a two-week capacity-building session with a French expert in laboratory and food safety.

The training is part of a technical assistance aimed at strengthening the capacities of Seychelles' laboratories working on official control for food safety under the regional programme to support food and nutritional security in the southwest Indian Ocean (SANOI).

The chief executive of the Seychelles Bureau of Standards (SBS), Andy Ally, said, "This training is expected to improve the efficiency of the SBS lab and to cut down the time it takes our technicians to conduct tests. This session has also helped our chemical lab especially to validate a new ISO method, which is an EU reference method for a piece of new equipment that does histamine tests. This will help us when we are seeking further accreditation later this year for this specific test."

The regional programme for food security and nutrition implemented by the EU Delegation to Mauritius and Seychelles and the Indian Ocean Commission aims at reducing malnutrition and food insecurity in the Indian Ocean region.

It is funded by the European Union under the 11^th European Development Fund (EDF), in partnership with the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC).  

Ally confirmed that there will be more training sessions under this programme that will be held in the future.

The facilitator of the training, which ended on Friday, Benoit Glaud, director of Analytical Laboratory Development, based in France, has over 20 years of experience in analytical chemistry, microbiology, material and pharmaceutical laboratories.

The training is expected to improve the efficiency of the SBS lab and cut down the time it takes the technicians to conduct tests. (Seychelles News Agency) Photo License: CC-BY

Glaud told reporters, "The standards in the laboratories in Seychelles I've found is very high, I visit laboratories nearly every month all around the world in Europe, Asia and Africa, and the level here is very good. This laboratory has already been accredited for a number of years since 2017 and really what we are doing now is building on these good levels to deliver more parameters."

He said that in the training, "We've been explaining how to do method validation, to check the accuracy, the precision, the level of detection, the level of quantification and also the uncertainty of measurement. This is one of the key requirements for an accredited laboratory and when you manage to do method validation it means you are part of this club of good laboratories that are recognised internationally."

Glaud added, "We're trying always to improve, putting new methods in place that can deliver results faster. We've analysed histamine in fish trying to put the EU reference method in place so the histamine result can be accepted more easily by EU buyers."

The programme included a sanitary and phytosanitary component, which is expected to contribute to strengthening and harmonising their standards in the region and developing a network of quality control and surveillance laboratories in the IOC member states.

One of the laboratory technicians at the SBS, Cheris Benstrong, said, "Laboratory work sometimes becomes stagnant therefore these types of training are very important even though the training might be similar we can expand on the subjects and go more in-depth."