ERAS - Eurotox

EUROTOX Mission

EUROTOX aims to foster toxicology, both scientifically and educationally, in all countries of Europe. To this, EUROTOX organises an annual scientific congress, workshops, and postgraduate training courses.
EUROTOX is actively harmonising toxicology education and training, having established the European Register of Toxicologists in 1994.
Furthermore EUROTOX honours annually a distinguished European toxicologist by its Merit Award. Young toxicologists are encouraged by the annual Young Scientist Award, which is awarded every year to the best presentation at the EUROTOX Congress.

Opportunities

How to Advertise

BHMF FUND

To honour Professor Bo Holmstedt, the Bo Holmstedt Memorial Fund (BHMF), in collaboration with EUROTOX, has established the Bo Holmstedt Memorial Lecture to be presented to an outstanding European Toxicologist at the EUROTOX Annual Congress meeting. The foundation is also supporting the Paracelcus symposium at the annual meeting. Bo Holmstedt's great interest in the teaching of toxicology and supported research in developing countries, a travelling lecture fellowship has also been established to allow a toxicologist from a developing country to spent some time in a European laboratory or regulatory agency.

Committees

Speciality Sections

Each speciality section has been created to give the opportunity to all society members interested in a particular field of toxicology to exchange scientific views and to increase awareness through organization of specialized symposia, workshops, continuing education courses etc.

Speciality sections in several fields have been proposed in 1995/1996, among which four sections have already started with their scientific activities.

EUROTOX RISK ASSESSMENT SPECIALITY SECTION (ERAS)

OFFICERS

Chairman: David Bell (david.bell@echa.europa.eu)
Secretary: Heidi Foth (heidi.foth@medizin.uni-halle.de)

MINUTES

Report of the General Meeting 2004 held in Tampere on July 13, 2004

Agenda for the face-to-face meeting in Cavtat at Eurotox 2006

Since the creation of the Risk Assessment Speciality Section (one of the several speciality sections within EUROTOX) quite some years ago, the able and enthusiastic initiators, Torbjörn Malmfors and Leif Busk, organised a number of successful meetings. By a concurrence of circumstances, unfortunately no activities have taken place since 1999, and it was (and is!) intended to re-activate the section, particularly because risk assessment of (potentially toxic) chemicals has become increasingly important during the past few years.

Not only in the fields of human and veterinary medicines, pesticides, the policy on bulk chemicals of the EU, etc., the demands on safety and effectivity are steadily increasing, but also some recent food contamination incidents have triggered a growing awareness of the authorities that proper risk assessment is a key instrument to meet the public's demand for safe food items, and to address the health risks in cases of incidents. The institution of the European Food Safety Authority and national food agencies in many European countries are just illustrations of this.

With this in mind we are convinced that a renewed risk assessment speciality section could contribute significantly to, and could provide a platform for discussions on the scientific basics and pitfalls of up-to-date risk assessment. We just remind you to the ongoing discussions on, e.g.:

- the question whether or not there is a threshold for genotoxic carcinogenicity
- the use and misuse of LD50 values
- more appropriate and refined uncertainty factors, based on toxicokinetics and
- dynamics
- the concept of NOAEL versus the concept of benchmark dose
- probabilistic modelling in risk assessment methodology
- the use of Monte Carlo simulations
- the threshold of Toxicological Concern
- etc.

So, wake up, show your interest and make yourself known to the initiators of the restart of the risk assessment speciality section (the old membership list of the section has unfortunately gone lost, but would anyway be outdated by now). The EUROTOX membership must count a lot of risk assessors -often we have the impression nowadays that two or three risk assessors judge the work of only one toxicologist! Moreover, we are fully convinced that we all have every now and than the feeling to skate on very thin when we assess risks. We heard an American colleague saying to the magician performing at the congress dinner of the Aarhus congress in 1997: "I am a magician too. I am a risk assessor!" Nevertheless, the public and the authorities do still trust us, and we are responsible for not putting that trust to shame! We need to discuss the numerous hot issues, we need to harmonise, and we need to keep doing our very best to assess the risks of chemicals in every day's life as good and scientifically reliable as possible.

The Risk Assessment Speciality Section intends to develop the following activities:

including issues related to risk assessment in the future programmes of EUROTOX congresses
considering the possibilities to organise an annual workshop on issues related to risk assessment
organising continuing education courses on risk assessment.

Persons interested are asked to consider their active participation in one or more of the above mentioned activities. In addition you are asked to suggest items to be considered in our future meetings. But also if you are only interested to become am member of this speciality section, just make your name and address known to either one of the two initiators below!