Doha: The State of Qatar has hosted the advanced regional training course on leveraging the isotope-based confirmatory techniques for residues contaminants in food products in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) through its regional technical cooperation project for food safety. The event brought together 40 specialists from Qatar and 18 other countries and marked the first training session since Qatar's food safety laboratories were accredited as a collaborating center for the IAEA in June 2024. It was part of the Practical Arrangements (PA) signed between the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) and IAEA in the field of human health, including food safety. According to Qatar News Agency, the course aimed to strengthen the region's scientific and technical capacities in food safety, with the participants receiving both theoretical and practical training on the latest techniques for analyzing food contaminants, including pesticide residues, veterinary drug residues, and mycotoxins, u tilizing isotopic techniques and confirmatory analysis through mass spectrometry. Director of the Food Safety Department at the Ministry of Public Health, Wasan Al Baker, highlighted IAEA's role in building human resource capabilities in this vital field, stressing the importance of the course in achieving the targeted objectives. For his part, National Liaison Assistant (NLA) to the IAEA in Qatar and Director of the Radiation Protection Department at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MoECC), Abdulrahman Al Abduljabbar, emphasized the importance of technical cooperation in the field of food safety, highlighting the pivotal role this training course plays in enhancing the technical capabilities of food safety specialists in the region.
