Documents dangerous substances 161 results

"Agreed criteria for diagnosing occupational diseases will help in ensuring consistency in clinical decisions, and contribute to management of individual cases and prevention of disease in occupationally-exposed groups. The European Commission (EC) produced its first schedule of occupational diseases in 1962. Other agencies and organizations in different countries also have their lists of occupational diseases, although guidance on recognizing such diseases is less readily available. In recognition of this need, the EC produced a document in 1963 titled ‘Medical particulars on diseases recorded in the European schedule of occupational diseases.' This was updated in 1994 by a working group of EU experts, resulting in the publication of ‘Information notices on diagnosis of occupational diseases.' A revision of the 1994 document was commissioned ten years later. The current document ‘Criteria for the diagnosis of occupational diseases' is a result of the efforts of a new EU expert working group. The group included several experts who worked on the 1994 document and new members from different EU countries. In addition, observers representing unions and industry were invited. Implications that the conclusions of the group might have on workers' rights to compensation as per the systems applicable in each case and/or system were felt to be outside the group's remit."

An evaluation was performed on the first group (41) of completed risk assessments for chemicals of the EU priority lists (Existing Chemicals; EC Regulation 793/93). The evaluation focussed on the conclusions of the risk assessments. The EU risk assessment process detected a high number of substances of concern. Furthermore priority chemicals may pose (potential) risks to the whole range of protection goals of the risk assessment. The predictability of the risk assessments for priority chemicals was investigated. Our a priori knowledge on possible risks of priority chemicals is found to be poor, especially for consumers. Both for environment and human health the (potential) risks were linked with a broad spectrum of use patterns. It is concluded that no industry category can in advance be excluded from performing risk assessments. For a great number of chemicals, additional testing was found to be needed to finalise the risk assessment. This evokes questions about the completeness of the current base-set, but also about the suitability of some of the submitted human health tests that should initially fulfil the base-set needs. The results of this evaluation are useful for future discussions on risk assessment processes for chemicals.