Bedford Prize for paper on benzene

A British Occupational Hygiene Society product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 21, 2006

BOHS's latest Bedford Prize has been awarded for a paper which Dr Roel Vermeulen wrote, with 14 collaborators, on benzene and toluene exposure levels in two shoe factories in Tianjin, China.

Dr Vermeulen was at the Occupational Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland when he wrote the paper, but has now returned to his earlier base at the University of Utrectht in the Netherlands, at its Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences.

The paper is part of a long-term collaborative study on benzene exposure and its effects, mainly between the US National Cancer Institute, University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Occupational Health and Poison Control in Beijing.

The Bedford Prize is awarded for the best paper in BOHS's journal, Annals of Occupational Hygiene.

Commenting on the paper, the editor in chief of the annals, Dr Trevor Ogden, says "This is an excellent example of a thorough long-term study of exposure, which used modern statistical techniques to plan and analyse the sampling".

"The authors were able to quantify the main contributing factors using principal component analysis".

"No doubt it was this high-quality and thorough approach which attracted the judging panel to this paper".

The Bedford Prize is awarded every other year.

Anyone can nominate papers to the shortlist, and the choice is then made by a panel of the journal Editorial Board and recent presidents of BOHS.

This was the paper judged to be the best from the years 2004 and 2005, and the prize will be presented to Roel at Occupational Hygiene 2007, BOHS's Annual Conference which is to be held next year in Glasgow from 17th to 19th April.

The winner two years ago, Professor Dick Heederik, was also from the Utrecht Institute, confirming its position as one of the leading occupational hygiene centres in Europe.

Since the award was made, Roel Vermeulen has joined the Editorial Board of the Annals, and is now one of its assistant editors.

Roel obtained his MSc in Environmental Sciences with honours in 1995 at Wageningen University and his PhD in 2001 at Utrecht University.

Besides his PhD fellowship he co-worked as a research assistant in several national and international projects with special focus on exposure assessment methodologies before joining the National Cancer Institute in 2001.

In 2006 he took up his current position as an investigator at the Environmental Epidemiology Group of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, at Utrecht University.

He has (co-)authored over 65 peer-reviewed papers and has served as a consultant to several institutions and European Union projects.

His research activities focus on the assessment of occupational exposures and the use of biological markers of exposure and effect in epidemiological and cross-sectional biomarker studies and methodological studies to improve exposure assessment techniques.

He is currently involved in studies on the carcinogenic effect of benzene, diesel, and pesticides and the etiology of bladder, lung and hematopoietic and lymphatic malignancies.