Abstract
Microbiological analyses are carried out on clinical, food, feed and environmental samples. The aims of the analyses are diagnostic or estimation of the safety or the quality of the sample. Important decisions are made on the basis of microbiological analyses. Little attention, however, is paid to the uncertainty of measurement of microbiological analyses. In microbiological cultivation techniques the result is obtained by counting individual objects. The normally low number of counted objects strongly affects the result of the analysis and its uncertainty. Because of the importance of the particle statistical variation to the uncertainty, the approaches developed for chemical analyses are not directly applicable to microbiology. This paper discusses microbial analyses and describes a novel guidance document for the estimation of measurement uncertainty in culturing methods [1].
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References
Niemelä SI (2001) Uncertainty of quantitative microbiological culture methods. (In Finnish, to be translated into English and later available in electronic form at: http://www.mikes.fi). The Centre for Metrology and Accreditation in Finland (MIKES) J 1/2001, 69p ISBN 952–5209–3
ISO (1995) Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement, I st edn. International Organization for Standardization ( ISO ), Geneva
EURACHEM (2000) Quantifying un- certainty in analytical measurement, 2nd edn. Laboratory of the Govern- ment Chemist (LGC ), Teddington, UK
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Niemi, R.M., Niemelä, S.I. (2001). Measurement uncertainty in microbiological cultivation methods. In: De Bièvre, P., Günzler, H. (eds) Measurement Uncertainty in Chemical Analysis. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05173-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05173-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-07884-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-05173-3
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