Working Party on Quality Assurance and Quality Monitoring of Culture Media (WPCM)

A Working Party on Quality Assurance and Quality Monitoring of Microbiological Culture Media (WPCM) was initiated and approved by the plenary session during the International Microbiology Congress in Munich in 1978. Terms of reference were to elaborate a ’Pharmacopoeia of Culture Media’, including recommendations for media for specific purposes, as a result of consensus meetings of a limited group of experts.
Recommendations were to be updated periodically. A number of successful meetings were organised (amongst others) in Calla de Mallorca, Dallas/Texas, London, Manchester, Pécs, Heidelberg, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Bologna and, most recently (2008), in Bath. The scope of activities has been gradually widened.
Documents published include a ‘Pharmacopoeia’ in two special issues of the International Journal of Food Microbiology, and a book ’Culture Media for Food Microbiology‘ (eds. Corry, Curtis and Baird, Vol. 34 in the series ‘Progress in Industrial Microbiology, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1995). The second edition was published by Elsevier in 2003 as Progress in Industrial Microbiology Vol. 37, and a third edition, expanded to include media for Water Bacteriology, is to be published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2011.

For more information, please contact: Gordon Curtis (Convenor, ICFMH-WPCM), gdwcurtis@tiscali.co.uk