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Environnement, Risques & Santé

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Inventory and identification of environmental threats to public health Volume 8, issue 6, Novembre-Décembre 2009

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Institut de veille sanitaire Département santé environnement 12 rue du Val d’Osne 94 Saint Maurice France, HPC Envirotec S.A. 21, rue du Tertre La-Chapelle-des-Fougeretz CS 46833 35768 Saint Grégoire Cedex France

To fulfill its tasks of surveillance, monitoring, and alert, the environmental health department of the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance has assigned to HPC Envirotec, under the direction of a scientific committee uniting institutional and private partners, a project to identify and categorize environmental threats in a strategic perspective aimed at analysing the implementation of appropriate methods of surveillance and alert. The definition of the environmental threat is based on the concept of exposure situation, and environment is defined in its widest sense, as all that is exogenous to humans. The procedure consisted in identifying information sources and then criteria for categorization, according to the degree of governmental involvement. In all, 106 exposure situations were listed and placed in 3 categories: 62 with no ongoing surveillance; 21 measured regularly in the environment, without any definitive conclusions about their health effects; and 22 for which regular public health surveillance is ongoing. The site mentioned most often is the immediate home environment (59 situations); the air is the primary vector of exposure (70 times); the main sources are industry, agriculture, biological reservoirs and materials; the principal agents are microorganisms, metals, and combustion and processing products. The exhaustiveness of the inventory, quite relative despite very proactive research, the capacity of description during exposure situations, and data quality are some of the limitations to be considered. These results must be interpreted as trends rather than as representative of environmental threats. The method developed has the advantage of being reusable as new threats are identified. Next the threats within each category must be ranked and surveillance methods listed at the international level.