Biomonitoring: A Useful Tool for Occupational Health Practitioners

“Excuse me. I did not capture the research area you mentioned. Could you please repeat?” said the woman in charge of registering new faculty members at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, whom I had on the phone. This was about a decade ago. “Occupational hygiene specializing in biomonitoring” I repeated. Well, she informed me that this field was not listed as an option for research areas at the School of Biology and Medicine. “What about occupational hygiene?” I asked (I had been informed that in Europe, we call industrial hygienists, occupational hygienists). Again, a negative answer. “What about occupational health?” I asked. Surely, this long-standing discipline exists, I thought. I had moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, 2 years prior with a PhD from the Medical College and the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Cincinnati (UC), and several years working at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In our Occupational Health class at UC, we had studied the groundbreaking work the legendary occupational medical physician, Alice Hamilton, had carried out in the early 1900s. Then about the rights of working people to have a safe and healthy workplace, which gave way for the New Deal in the 1930s [1] that profoundly increased the role of the US federal government in Occupational Safety and Health. In the 1960s, Unions pushed for federal legislation that ultimately resulted in the passage of the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 [1]. Occupational health experts began monitoring workers’ chemical exposures by measuring the internal dose of a chemical of interest. Human biomonitoring became a new tool in this era for assessing population-wide exposures to hazardous chemicals [2]. It gave a more reliable estimate of total exposures such as lead concentrations in urine [3]. Later, human biomonitoring methods sought to measure a chemical’s biotransformations in the body, its metabolites. Biomonitoring research is exploding now, several centuries after the occupational physician Bernardino Ramazzini formed the field of occupational medicine during the 17th century in Italy. The birthplace of the father of Occupational Health was in Europe, where I now work. “No,” said my university of Lausanne colleague, “these research fields are not listed either. Could occupational hygiene be listed as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, or mathematics?” the university colleague asked. I opted for chemistry because, as a nonclinician, medicine was out, but where does biomonitoring belong?