Documents biocides 7 results

"The prevention of occupational and environmental risks associated with the exposure to endocrine disruptors (EDC) represents a true challenge for experts worldwide. Traditional risk assessment methods included in current legislation prove inadequate to protect human health and the environment from EDCs, given the specific characteristics of these compounds. Protection from the effects of EDCs represents a new challenge that calls for a new paradigm based on the application of the precautionary principle and the adoption of urgent measures."

"La prevención de los riesgos para la salud y el medio ambiente por la exposición a disruptores endocrinos (EDC) supone un auténtico reto. Los métodos tradicionales de evaluación de riegos de las sustancias químicas incorporados a la normativa vigente no son válidos para proteger a la población y al medio ambiente frente a estas sustancias debido a sus particulares características toxicológicas. Este informe pretende dar a conocer qué son los EDC, explicar sus particularidades toxicológicas, sus efectos para la salud, las sustancias y actividades implicadas y ofrecer datos de exposición a EDC en España. Además, presenta 5 estudios de caso de exposición a EDC en diferentes actividades, mostrando posibles alternativas y ejemplos de eliminación o sustitución de estas sustancias. Por último, resume el marco normativo y presenta propuestas de actuación para reducir la exposición a disruptores endocrinos."

"Cancer-related chemical agents are present everywhere in our living environment. ‘Cancer-related' does not only refer to chemicals classified as ‘carcinogens', but also to substances for which there are strong indications that they (help to) cause cancer, like endocrine disrupting chemicals. They are used in many industrial sectors and in agricultural products and are also contained in household and other everyday products and objects. No need to say that humans should be exposed to the minimum and preferably not at all to these agents. In case of exposure, the risks must in any case be restricted as much as possible. This can be achieved, in the first place, by means of efficient regulations and policies.
REACH - the European Regulation for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals - is in effect since 1 June 2007. The first deadline has already passed. We wondered how REACH has progressed and how its implementation has proceeded up to present. For pesticides (the collective name for plant protection products and biocides) new regulations (for plant protection products) and a directive (for pesticides) have come into effect in recent years. For biocides a new EU Regulation is almost ready. Our country must adhere to all of these. In addition, Belgium at a federal level and Flanders at a regional level have listed a number of priorities and took a number of policy measures.
In the first chapter of the report you can read that environmental pollution has been underestimated as a cause of cancer for a long time. However, there are more and more indications that pollution largely contributes to the development of cancer. There is still quite some scientific uncertainty about the exact impact of the environment on the development of cancer, but there are more than enough scientific insights which urge us to be cautious. Chapter 1 of the report gives a short overview of those uncertainties and scientific insights.
A policy that is only targeted at chemicals which are officially classified as carcinogenic is not enough. At the symposium the VLK called for two major policy principles to be taken into account as well: the principle of physical-chemical hygiene and the precautionary principle. According to the principle of physical-chemical hygiene we should as much as possible restrict chemicals that are suspicious due to their intrinsic properties. The principle can be compared to the microbiological hygiene which was applied in the early twentieth century to push back infectious diseases. In the same way we now have to conduct a preventive policy for the chemicals in the environment. The precautionary principle states that scientific uncertainty may never be an excuse not to take measures. When there are enough reasons to assume that an activity or a product or substance can cause serious, irreversible damage to one's health or the environment, preventive measures must be taken. The measures must be cost-effective.
Both principles are required to reduce exposure to cancer-related agents in a fundamental way. In our evaluation we will be verifying to which extent these two policy principles have been taken into account."

"Under current European and national legislation, biocidal products must be registered based on a risk assessment with respect to humans, animals and the environment. Knowledge gaps, particularly in the area of human exposure assessment, make it very difficult to adequately assess the potential for exposure and thereby health risks for many biocidal use scenario's. A European-funded project has tackled this issue and ways are described to deal with the problem in an appropriate fashion. The approach is accepted by the European Commission for the Biocidal Product Directive as a TnG (Technical notes for Guidance). In the present paper only worker exposure will be considered. Problems and possible solutions with using the TnG in practice will be discussed."

"Nanosilver is one nanomaterial that is currently under a lot of scrutiny. Much of the discussion is based on the assumption that nanosilver is something new that has not been seen until recently and that the advances in nanotechnology opened completely new application areas for silver. However, we show in this analysis that nanosilver in the form of colloidal silver has been used for more than 100 years and has been registered as a biocidal material in the United States since 1954. Fifty-three percent of the EPA-registered biocidal silver products likely contain nanosilver. Most of these nanosilver applications are silver-impregnated water filters, algicides, and antimicrobial additives that do not claim to contain nanoparticles. Many human health standards for silver are based on an analysis of argyria occurrence (discoloration of the skin, a cosmetic condition) from the 1930s and include studies that considered nanosilver materials. The environmental standards on the other hand are based on ionic silver and may need to be re-evaluated based on recent findings that most silver in the environment, regardless of the original silver form, is present in the form of small clusters or nanoparticles. The implications of this analysis for policy of nanosilver is that it would be a mistake for regulators to ignore the accumulated knowledge of our scientific and regulatory heritage in a bid to declare nanosilver materials as new chemicals, with unknown properties and automatically harmful simply on the basis of a change in nomenclature to the term “nano”."