Human Biomonitoring in Europe

At present, the EU does not have a coordinated human biomonitoring programme, although many EU member states carry out some HBM activities on various pollutants and targeted population groups.

HBM Milestones in the EU

2003

In preparation for the 2003 EU Environment and Health Strategy, the EU set up a Technical Working Group on Biomonitoring and Children which delivered a set of recommendations to be considered in the EU Action Plan.

2004

The EU published a six year Community Action Plan on Environment and Health (2004-2010) with 13 priority areas. One of these areas committed to developing a coherent approach to Human Biomonitoring in Europe in close cooperation with the Member States.

2004-2006

To develop further EU activities on HBM, a Technical Biomonitoring Implementation Working Group was created as well as a specific project called ESBIO to provide the scientific and technical expertise needed to develop the framework for an EU wide pilot project.

The most interesting outcome from the ESBIO project is a European inventory on human biomonitoring activities which gives information about what individual governments in the EU are doing. It is organized by country, date and type of activity, and also provides contact details. However, it is a voluntary system and not entirely exhaustive and is only searchable by country and not pollutant. It also does not provide data of the levels of pollutants being found.

An EU promotional leaflet “Human biomonitoring – breaking the divide between environment and health” outlines why the EU thinks biomontioring is important and what they expect to gain from it.

Written on 18 December 2007.



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