By Laszlo Torma
The 8th European Pesticide Residue Workshop (EPRW 2010) was held in Strasbourg, FR on June 20-24, 2010. As usual, EPRW 2010 was a great success and it was a productive and worthwhile meeting.

First, I would like to share a little information about Strasbourg. The city is the capital of region which was part of the Holy Roman Empire and later annexed by France. In more recent history, Alsace changed hands four times between France and Germany in 75 years. Although the historical language of Alsace is Alsatian, a Germanic language, today most Alsatians speak French and only about 40% of the adult population is fluent in Alsatians. Strasbourg is the seat of several European Institution such as the European Parliament, the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights) and others.

Back to the meeting; EPRW meets every 2 years and in my opinion, it gets better and larger each time. In spite of the global economic down turn, there were about 500 participant and 30 exhibitors representing all the continents. The Scientific Organizing Committee has assembled a great program, including 29 oral presentations, more than 200 posters and a number of vendor sessions. Scientists from all over the world were represented and participated in various discussions to exchange new ideas in the area of pesticide regulations, residue monitoring, new analytical techniques and methodology. I enjoyed the high quality posters that have been presented. These posters demonstrated the desire of many scientists to share their practical and fundamental know how with the participant during the workshop. And last but certainly not least, I had the opportunity to work with our European distributor, LCTech from Germany and to visit with our mutual customers.