The Human Biomonitoring initiative HBM4EU will end in June 2022 after a period of five and a half years. The work will continue under the European Partnership for Risk Assessment of Chemicals (PARC), funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe for a further period of seven years.
Collect, analyze and evaluate data
The European Union (EU) regulates the use and marketing of chemicals. Therefore, data must be collected, analysed and evaluated in a comparable manner at EU level. Only in this way can the European institutions take effective measures to protect human health and the environment and to inform the public about the causes of pollution and possible ways of avoiding it.
A few results
- Plastic Plasticisers: An alarmingly high exposure to plasticisers was found in the European population, although they are already strictly regulated. Plasticisers were found in urine samples of all children and adolescents examined. Plasticisers have since been proven to be harmful to reproduction.
- PFAS: Perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) have been found in the blood of all young people surveyed in Europe. Up to a quarter of the young people are exposed to concentrations where negative health effects can no longer be excluded with sufficient certainty.
- Mixtures: Another focus was the analysis of chemical mixtures. During biomonitoring, a large number of industrial chemicals were found in the body. Assessing the health effects of this cocktail of chemicals is part of the current research.
The groundwork for establishing human biomonitoring
The initiative demonstrates that human biomonitoring is a very good strategy for characterising total human exposure to chemicals. The initiative indicates the urgency of accelerated and more global policy, and also demonstrates that targeted policy actions to reduce human exposure to chemicals can be successful. With the results, HBM4EU has now laid the groundwork for establishing long-term, sustainable human biomonitoring in the EU.
For more information, please visit the initiative’s page at www.hbm4eu.eu.
A decription of the initiative in german is here.
