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.
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