Prof Chrisjan Cruywagen awarded by AFMA

AFMA AWARDS GROUND-BREAKING WORK BY PROF CHRISJAN CRUYWAGEN ON MELAMINE IN SA
 
At its 62nd Annual General Meeting, hosted at the Euphoria Golf Estate and Hydro in Mookgophong (Naboomspruit), AFMA awarded its prestigious Barney van Niekerk - AFMA Technical person of the year award to Prof Chrisjan Cruywagen of the University of Stellenbosch for his ground breaking work on melamine in food and feed in South Africa over the past two years.

Prof Chrisjan Cruywagen receives the award from Dr Erhard Briedenhan, Chairman of AFMA.

During the time of global pet food and feed recalls in 2007, Prof Cruywagen obtained a LC-MS/MS method for melamine analysis and established it in the Central Analytical Facility of the Stellenbosch University. This was probably the first lab in South Africa to test feed and food samples for melamine as a service to industry. The presence of Melamine adulteration might also be confirmed by means of feed microscopy, which is a technique often used by Prof Cruywagen. At the time of the award, he was in the process to finalize a micro-chemical spot test to be used by microscopists to detect melamine in feed samples.

Prof Cruywagen is currently heading all melamine research at the Stellenbosch University and his team did the first trials with dairy cows to show that a pathway exists for the transmission of melamine from feed to milk.

This work was recently published (May 2009) as a “Hot Topic” in the Journal of Dairy Science as well as articles in the AFMA Matrix, March 2009 and June 2009.

It has also been proved that dietary melamine is highly absorbable and that the major excretion route is via urine, and that ingested melamine is deposited in meat and eggs and that it is absorbed from the soil by pasture grass when used as a fertilizer ingredient. His abstract on the recent melamine research was one of only 8 abstracts to be accepted for a special “late breaking/cutting edge research” oral presentation session on the opening day of the 2009 Joint Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association, American Society of Animal Science and the Canadian Society of Animal Science, that was held in Montreal, July 12-16, this year.

AFMA congratulates Prof Cruywagen, with his unique contribution to the feed industry.

(Source: Afma Matrix, December 2009, p24)