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EDITORIAL
by A. Heyndrickx
Chairman of the Congress
Deportment of Toxicology, State University of Ghent
Hospitaalstraat 13 . 9000 Ghent. Belgium
Honourable Vice-Prime Minister,
Honourable Past Rector,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For the second time at the State University of Ghent in Belgium, we are having the World Congress on Chemical and Biological Warfare. We have also as a subject the Industrial Disasters. As toxicologists we are interested in the Environment, we have to deal with it every day.
Since the First World Congress, chemical warfare in the Gulf Region is still going on. We had the opportunity to treat all over Europe in University Clinics many patients who were suffering from those attacks. It is a pleasure that many of the scientists who were treating them are here today to discuss with you their experiences and how we could improve the decontamination and also the suffering of men. Since then also we have had chemical disasters as in Bhopal (India), by Union Carbide, and we can also evaluate what was going on in air, water and soil pollution and how we should treat them. This year, it is 10 years ago that in Seveso, Hofmann-La Roche, the company lcmesa, caused the so dangerous intoxication by dioxines for people living around the factory where we had also to evacuate many in order to prevent a further subacute intoxication or even a chronic one.
It means that today more and more society has to deal not only in the Western industrialized World, with those possibilities. We have to see with the technology we have today how we can improve it in order to avoid such catastrophies. At the same time the responsibilities for the governments to have disaster plans, if something would occur today that we could prevent such disasters, and at the same time take the responsibilities for citizens so that we can protect them and that we can avoid such catastrophies.
Technology has changed the last decades going to massive production of some intermediates which can be so toxic and even more dangerous than chemical warfare agents today. Many of those chemicals we need, we cannot avoid them because we have to produce compounds that society today expects. It means that the responsible engineers, chemists, pharmacists, physicians, all of them evaluate the dangers, see what we can accept and apply a technology that could protect us from such disasters. It means also that in developing countries, before we can start up such factories, we have to rely on specialists who can control in the same manner as we do in the Western industrialized world using the same standards of production, maintenance following, and engineering. If that is not the case and if we don’t have the necessary specialists, such factories should not be installed and working.
In these fields of toxicology and pathology where we have new intoxications to detect and to treat, where for many chemicals we don’t even have antidotes, everyone understands that we have to be much more careful than in the past. I agree that always there will be a calculated risk, that we cannot avoid and at the same time we cannot stop the industry from going ahead, but all those parameters have to come together and have to be evaluated. This and World Congress where we were adding those chapters, brings together specialists from all parts of the world.
I hope that their knowledge and fruitful discussions, we will have during those three days, will be useful for all governments and at the same time for industry. Today public health is the most important parameter for the future. If those compounds don’t bring anything forward, what’s the use of it and what's the use to produce them. So I hope that in this field we will be able in The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists and in other scientific societies to solve those problems.
It is a pleasure that the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists meets for the 3rd time in Ghent again. This society, started in London by Dr. Curry, also Dr. Honoris Causa of our University this year, has more than one thousand members all over the world, seeing each other regularly. It is a pleasure that they are with us again as they were also by the first centennial celebration of the Department of Toxicology here in Ghent in 1976. They accepted the invitation to come again here as we have done many times in the friendly atmosphere, helping each other in this very difficult field of toxicology.
In the section of Terrorism, TIAFT members will discuss the new techniques of evaluating explosives, the residual analysis and detection, field of great concern in the Western World and the mediterranian region. Air-port safety and control are at risk, forensic toxicology plays a big part in it.
To our present President Dr. McLinden and also to our past chairman Prof. Brandenberger and all of you who are in Ghent, welcome.
Allocution
by His Excellency Mr. C. Verhofstadt
Vice-Prime Minister. Minister of Science Policy
It is with his warmest congratulations that the Minister of Science Policy of Belgium — who I have the honor to represent — wellcomes the participants at the Second World Congress on «Compounds in Biological and Chemical Warfare : Toxicological Evaluation. Industrial Chemical Disasters», organized these coming days at the State University of Ghent.
During this century, a fast scientific and technological evolution, especially in biology and chemistry, has produced large benefits for mankind: everyday's life and work became much easier by the introduction of many new products and processes.
Moreover due to the progress in medicine and bio-sciences, many illnesses which ravaged before entire communities, cities and even countries, are today eliminated — at least in the industrial Western World, I would like to say unfortunately only in the Industrial World.
However this progress of sciences led also to the development and often to the introduction on the battlefield of new, ever more devastating weapons. Our country was the testing ground of this new generating of so called C-weapons. Indeed as it is well known, during the First World War, chemical weapons were used massively on the battlefields of the Flanders, only a few miles away from this city of Ghent.
This is, among others, one of the reasons why the Belgium community and its scientists are so sensitive to the consequences of the use of chemical and biological weapons, which potentially can be as destructive as nuclear weapons.
Apart its military use, the rapid development of the biological and chemical sciences and its. ever growing applications introduces the risk of industrial accidents, such as the Bhopal disaster.
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