HUMAN BIOMONITORING INITIATIVE – FUTURE FOR HUMAN EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT TO CHEMICALS

People are exposed to a complex mixture of chemicals in their daily lives through the environment,
consumer products, food and drinking water and at work. The human biomonitoring is one of the tools how
to assess the associated health impacts of chemical mixtures to human health and improve risk assessment of
chemical. In the case of established biomonitoring system in the country there is possibility to analyze data
at the level of the individual and human biomonitoring data can inform medical treatment or guidance on
the need to reduce exposure.
In the 2017 in the Europe started HORIZON 2020 project “Human Biomonitoring initiative for Europe
Union” (HBM4EU). The main objective for Human Biomonitoring initiative is to generate evidence on
the causal links between human exposure to chemicals and health outcomes and in work with chemical risk
assessors adapt chemical risk assessment methodologies to use human biomonitoring data and to account
for the contribution of multiple external exposure pathways to the total chemical body burden. Create limit
values for human health and environment protection.
The purpose is not only to create new guidance limit values for the chemical under concern and
communicate new knowledge to policy makers for effective implementation in a legal act, but as well as to
evaluate the effectiveness of existing policies.
Riga Stradins university researchers are participating in the two HBM4EU subprojects: “Joint survey of
pesticides (SPECIMEn study)” under WP-15 and “E-waste study” under WP-8. More information available: https://www.hbm4eu.eu/