Renewal of the International Cooperation for Health (IC4Health) consortium
The International Cooperation for Health (IC4Health) consortium has been renewed. It is made up of ANSES, Santé publique France, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).
IC4Health’s partners met on 25 October 2023 at the RIVM headquarters in Bilthoven, Netherlands to sign a memorandum of understanding extending their cooperation in public health and risk assessment for a renewable five-year period. Created in 2015, IC4Health is a group of like-minded national agencies from European countries that are committed to public health & safety and risk assessment. The aim of the consortium is to tackle health challenges for which European and international cooperation and collaboration are essential. This partnership involves networking, the sharing of experiences, and strategic development.
Productive exchanges between partners
Since the consortium was set up, its partner agencies have met on a number of occasions to share their work on topics of common interest, including tobacco products, endocrine disruptors, antimicrobial resistance, and nutrition research. These meetings have also provided an opportunity to share experiences and thoughts on common strategic challenges, such as scientific data and information systems, the way in which sustainable development is taken into account, public confidence in the expertise of health agencies, health challenges in the face of climate change, the circular economy, and more.
Large-scale research projects
The teams from the five agencies in the IC4Health network regularly work together on European projects. For example, they all collaborated as part of the European Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU) from 2017 to 2021 and are now contributing to the European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC), coordinated by ANSES. They were also members of the One Health European Joint Programme, also coordinated by ANSES, which recently came to an end.