Engelsk titel: The Medical Birth Registry of Norway in environmental surveillance – possibilities and limitations
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Författare:
Kristensen, Petter
Email: petter.kristensen@stami.no
Språk: Nor
Antal referenser: 52
Dokumenttyp:
Artikel
UI-nummer: 17110011
Sammanfattning
Surveillance by The Medical Birth Registry of Norway has been a prioritized task since the start in 1967.
This presentation covers surveillance in the occupational and outer environment. Surveillance has primary
focus on birth defects but encompasses also other adverse effects present at birth or during the first year of
life. Clusters, apparent unusual increases in time and/or space of adverse events, are important in surveillance.
Systematic surveillance is largely carried out in the EUROCAT network, and is particularly suited for
discovering exposure agents that are sudden, widespread, and/or highly teratogenic. Ad-hoc environmental
surveillance can be carried out in the aftermath of an exposure incident, searching for increases in adverse
outcomes under suspicion, or as a search for causal explanations after observing unexpected clustering of
adverse outcomes. I present examples of the two: investigations after Chernobyl, and examinations of
clustering of birth defects among children whose fathers served on board the naval vessel KNM Kvikk. The
Achilles heel of the Birth Registry’s environmental surveillance is insufficient exposure data.