Alternative calculation of measurement uncertainty with global approach in food microbiology

Abstract

Calculation of measurement uncertainty is a requirement for all laboratories accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 including those carrying out microbiological analyses. Today, calculation of measurement uncertainty in microbiological analyses using precision data according to global approach principles is widely recognized by the microbiologists due to difficulties in quantification of individual uncertainty sources. In food microbiology, precision data obtained from different samples usually show over-dispersion, and the use of over-dispersed data may result in large variance. The current ISO standard on measurement uncertainty in food microbiology proposes the use of log-transformed precision data to overcome this problem. This paper proposes an alternative procedure to calculate the measurement uncertainty in food microbiology using non-logarithmic precision data. The calculations used in this procedure based on relative range of duplicate analyses can be applied to intra-laboratory reproducibility data obtained from microbiological analyses of which duplicate results show relatively low variation.