| Posted: January 11, 2007 |
Next OECD workshop on nanotechnology safety announced |
| (Nanowerk News) The 2nd Meeting of the OECD Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials will take place in Berlin/Germany, on April 25-27, 2007. |
| The OECD Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN) is a subsidiary body of the OECD Chemicals Committee. This programme aims to promote international co-operation on the human health and environmental safety of manufactured nanomaterials, and involves approaches to the safety testing and risk assessment of manufactured nanomaterials. |
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| The 1st Meeting of the WPMN was held the 26th-27th October in London, United Kingdom. The main outcome of this meeting was a Programme of Work that has been endorsed by the 40th Chemicals Committee (15-17 November 2006). The Programme of Work addresses three main areas listed as follows: |
| – Identification, Characterisation, Definitions, Terminology and Standards; |
| – Testing Methods and Risk Assessment; |
| – Information sharing, Co-operation and Dissemination. |
| The WPMN has started to implement the programme of work through different projects, which will lead to: |
| 1) the development of a database on human health and environmental safety (EHS) research related to manufactured nanomaterials; |
| 2) the development of a global strategy for EHS research on manufactured nanomaterials; |
| 3) the testing of a representative set of manufactured nanomaterials; |
| 4) the evaluation of the suitability of existing OECD test guidelines (chemical safety) for nanomaterials; |
| 5) information exchange on national regulatory programmes and voluntary regulatory schemes; |
| 6) co-operation on risk assessment and undertaking exposure measurements. |
| Progress on each of these projects will be discussed at the 2nd Meeting of WPMN. |
| Source: OECD |
