Belgian and European citizens are exposed to multiple environmental stressors, such as chemicals
pollution, noise or lack of green space. The actual PFAS crisis in Flanders illustrates the urgent
need for scientific evidence to shape environment & health policy making. EIRENE-Flanders is the
Belgian hub of EIRENE RI, the European Environmental Exposure Assessment Research
Infrastructure. In line with the holistic ‘exposome’ approach, it will allow to capture the complex
interactions between environmental exposure, lifestyle and socio-economic variables, their
impact on biological processes in the human body and effects on human health. It provides the
infrastructure for large scale collection of human samples and data, efficient measurements of
large sets of chemicals, metabolites and proteins, connection to existing datasets, and use of
advanced bioinformatics and data science methods to process these large amounts of data.
EIRENE-Flanders will contribute to reduce the environmental burden of disease through scientific
evidence for environmental, chemicals, food safety and preventive health policies both at Flemish
and at European level, and personalised medicine approaches.