The Service “Medical Expertise and Data Intelligence” hosts the medical, epidemiological and toxicological expertise in environmental and occupational health/medicine. The Service supports the National Service for Environmental Medicine at the Hospital Center Emile Mayrisch (CHEM) and is in charge of the European science-policy programs and the epidemiological surveys in the general and working population in Luxembourg that include human biological monitoring and/or environmental/occupational exposure assessment.
Our nursing team samples air, dust, surface and consumer materials in patients’ houses, in public buildings, in private companies or at the workplace. They take human biological samples such as blood, urine and hair when a medical doctor decides to measure the concentrations of environmental (or occupational) chemicals and microbiological agents, and their metabolites, directly in the patient.
Our nursing team has advanced formation in general and medical toxicology and assists the medical doctors of the National Service for Environmental Medicine in CHEM during the consultations at the outpatient clinic. One nurse takes care of the patient throughout his/her whole trajectory at CHEM and remains available for all questions and practical information, as such acting as the “referent-nurse” for the patient.
As National Health Laboratory, we limit the activities of our nursing team to situations with a documented health problem in patients or workers. We thus proceed following a medical prescription or a request from general practitioners, specialist medical doctors, doctors in occupational medicine, safety & health referents or equivalent, or at the request of the Ministry of Health.
We are leading PARC, the European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals for Luxembourg (May 2022 – 2029).
The Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (https://www.eu-parc.eu) aims to develop next-generation chemical risk assessment to protect human health and the environment. It supports the European Union’s Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability and the European Green Deal’s “Zero pollution” ambition with new data, knowledge, methods and tools, expertise and networks.
The PARC program has three main objectives:
(1) Develop the scientific skills needed to address current and future challenges in chemical safety,
(2) Provide new data, methods and innovative tools to those responsible for assessing and managing the risks of chemical exposure, and
(3) Strengthen the networks that bring together actors specialized in the different scientific fields contributing to risk assessment.
Our roles in PARC:
LNS is the Grant Signatory for Luxembourg: in this role, we have included the research institutes in Luxembourg as Affiliated Entities (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology and Luxembourg Institute of Health).
LNS is the National Hub Contact Point for Luxembourg: in this role, LNS is ensuring the coordination and exchange within the Member State.
We set up and carry out epidemiological surveys in the domain of environmental and occupational health/medicine. These surveys include human biological monitoring and/or exposure assessment in the general or in the working population.
As such, we take care of the entire process flow, i.e. from the writing of the protocol/CRFs and the submission to the Ethical Committee, the fieldwork, the dispatching of the samples to the laboratories, the statistical analyses and the reporting of the results.
Our different technical responsible participate in several working groups and congresses at (inter-)national level to ensure that we implement the state-of-the-art epidemiology, toxicology and evidence-based medical expertise in environmental and occupational health/medicine. For example: ECHA.
Our technical responsible participate as experts in the European Health Partnerships, more specifically in the tasks related to environmental and occupational epidemiology, toxicology and medicine.