On May 18-19, 2016 the symposium “The future of risk assessment and toxicity testing for chemical mixtures” will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands. This event is co-organized by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the Dutch Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). It aims to present recent progress in the development of methods for assessing the risks to public health arising from exposure to chemical mixtures. These new developments are responding to two interconnected challenges, i.e. the need for an efficient test strategy for mixtures (considering more than one compound at a time) and the need to reduce the animal use in toxicity testing. One example of such novel strategy is provided by EFSA’s recent work on assessing the risk from exposure to multiple pesticides; this methodology can potentially be extended to cover other groups of substances. The feasibility of emerging approaches to mixture toxicity assessment as well as “prioritization for future testing in Europe and beyond” will also be discussed.

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RIVM (March 2016). “EFSA-RIVM Symposium.

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