The international conference „Occupational Surveillance and Environmental Health“ was organized on 18.-21. November in Fez, the city where the Kairaouine madrasa was founded in 859, described by UNESCO as the oldest university in the world. The conference supported by BioNet, the Euro-African Biomonitoring Network, took place in the impressive new campus of the Euromed University in Fez. BioNet is an ERASMUS project co-funded by the European Union to enhance closer cooperation between European (Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark) and African (Morrocco, Benin, Ethiopia) universities by co-building capacities for the assessment of environmental exposure in the population.
As several BioNet partners from Europe participate in EIRENE, IHEN and/or PARC, the achievements and impacts of these EU project were presented in several invited lectures. Aziza Menouni from EIRENE Belgium (KU Leuwen) was a member of the organizing committee. Radu Corneliu Duca from EIRENE Luxembourg spoke about tracking the invisible through human biomonitoring in PARC. Lode Godderis from KU Leuven highlighted a need for bridging universities, hospitals and the work places when talking about he human sentinel surveillance.
Jana Klánová was invited to describe how EIRENE and IHEN work together to build the international human exposome network and the underlying research infrastructure. She explained how African countries can get involved in the nework and benefit from the newly built experimental capacities of EIRENE. She also mentioned synergies with the NEXUS network in the US and how the EU and US networks work together to establish the Global Exposome Forum. She invited participants to the first global summit of GEF organised jointly in Spain next year, as well as the upcoming ADRD/Exposome Symposium to meet in Morocco in 2027.
The EIRENE consortium together with the PARC partnership have organized a joint knowledge lab at the 6th Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention on Mercury held in Geneva, Switzerland 3-7 November 2025.
The two-day event brought together representatives of the European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), policymakers, and institutional partners to discuss strategic priorities and further the Forum’s objectives within the European Research Area.
