Standards Development

Scope

This International Standard defines terms related to quality assurance of culture media and reagents and specifies the requirements for the preparation of culture media and reagents intended for the microbiological analysis of food, animal feed, and samples from the food or feed production environment as well as all kinds of water.

These requirements are applicable to all categories of culture media and reagents prepared for use in laboratories performing microbiological analyses.

This document also sets criteria and describes methods for the performance testing of culture media and reagents.

The document is applicable to end-users, commercial bodies, non-commercial bodies and labs preparing their own media.

This covers all formats of culture media and reagents.

The principles covered in this Standard, as described above, can be equally applied to the preparation, storage and performance testing of culture media and reagents (used in the intended analysis as described above) that are not captured in international Standards; this includes proprietary culture media, or other methods.

The criteria for the performance of those culture media and reagents will be described within those other methods or in the manufacturers’ certificates.