Preface

Chemical health threats can have impacts across national borders and so may be more effectively tackled by international cooperation than by individual governments acting alone. As such, in November 2013, the European Union (EU) published the EU Decision for Serious Cross Border Threats to Health (Decision 1082/2013/EU) establishing a number of mechanisms for a coordinated, Europe-wide response with regards to preparedness, risk assessment, risk management, risk communication and international cooperation.

During the development of Decision 1082/2013/EU significant preparatory work was undertaken to ensure that the systems in place were robust and could deliver the commitments under the Decision, particularly with regards to cross-border chemical health threats. This book aims to capture those developments together with complimentary work from other initiatives in a single volume.

Comprising a series of chapters from leading researchers and public health practitioners across Europe, this book covers recent developments in the field that support the implementation of these European legal instruments. It begins by contextualising the need for surveillance of toxic threats, before going on to examine some of the tools that have been developed to facilitate toxicosurveillance in Europe as well as current toxicosurveillance networks outside the EU. In addition, this book covers the European Union regulation concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), the work of various alerting systems for chemical health threats and the principles of robust risk assessment and management of chemical health threats in Europe. This book finishes with a series of real-world chemical health threat case studies that draw upon the key principles highlighted in previous chapters.

This volume provides a vital resource for researchers, students, educators, policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in key questions facing global hazardous substance control.

Raquel Duarte-Davidson, Tom Gaulton, Stacey Wyke and Samuel Collins