Interview Eva Ougier Coordinator of the RNV3PE team, Health Alerts & Vigilance Department

How are the RNV3PE’s data used?

The RNV3PE has an information system shared by all the network’s partners, which collects data from the 28 occupational disease consultation centres (CCPPs) in France. More than 500,000 consultations have been recorded in it since 2001. These precious data are used for scientific studies carried out by ANSES’s expert groups, for the purposes of prevention. They include the Working Group on “Emergence”, made up mainly of occupational health physicians, which monitors the literature, discusses clinical cases reported by the CCPPs and assesses the level of action to be taken if a signal is identified.

In 2023, the group examined the health risk associated with exposure to psyllium seeds. why?

In 2023, we reported on the risks associated with psyllium seed powder. While its sensitising effects are well known in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors, it is also increasingly being used in the food industry to replace gluten and eggs, respectively in gluten-free and vegan products. A case of occupational rhinitis due to psyllium was identified in the RNV3PE database, concerning a production worker in a food processing company. This is now expected to lead to increased vigilance for these newly exposed workers, including bakers. We therefore identified a new “triad”, i.e. a disease-exposure combination that we already knew about but that constitutes an emerging risk in a new industry sector. This emerging occupational risk was described in an article in our Vigil’ANSES newsletter and in communications in scientific journals and conferences. The aim is to reach and raise awareness among as many occupational physicians as possible, as they are on the front line when it comes to detecting high-risk situations in the workplace.

The network has broadened its scope to include environmental exposure and has become the RNV3PE: what challenges does this change bring ?

A 2019 decree added an environmental component to the scope of the CCPPEs’ expertise and the nomination of a regional occupational and environmental disease centre (CRPPE) for each region (possibly comprising several units within the region). To take this change into account, in January 2024 the network became the National Network for Monitoring and Prevention of Occupational and Environmental Diseases, with a new set of challenges. First of all, we need to determine which types of environmental disorders should be recorded by the CRPPEs and define the rules for coding environmental exposures, to ensure that these data can be exploited in a robust manner. It is also essential to develop the information system so that it can absorb all these new data. It is the working tool for the entire network, whose remit now extends beyond the field of occupational health to fully encompass environmental health.