Expert forecast on emerging biological risks related to occupational safety and health (OSH)

About 320,000 workers worldwide die every year of communicable diseases, some 5,000 in the European Union. In the last decade, media coverage has raised public awareness of biological hazards, such as anthrax at work due to bioterrorist activities, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the threat of avian flu. But biological agents are ubiquitous and, in many workplaces, workers face considerably harmful biological risks. The Community strategy 2002-06 called on the Agency to ‘set up a risk observatory’ to ‘anticipate new and emerging risks’. The expert forecast on emerging OSH biological risks was formulated within this context, from the results of three consecutive questionnaire-based surveys using the Delphi method. This factsheet sets out to present the results of this forecast