The Nordic Expert Group

The Nordic Expert Group - a Nordic collaboration for production of criteria documents on chemicals for occupational exposure limits.

The Nordic Expert Group for Criteria Documentation of Health Risks from Chemicals (NEG) consists of scientific experts from the Nordic countries representing different fields of science, such as toxicology, occupational hygiene and occupational medicine. The main task is to produce criteria documents to be used by the regulatory authorities of the Nordic countries as the scientific basis for setting occupational exposure limits (OELs) for chemical substances. Thus, the actual setting of an OEL is a national concern.

The secretariat is run by the Swedish Work Environment Authority (SWEA) and is located at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. NEG is mainly financed by SWEA and the Norwegian Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion. All countries contribute with scientific expertise. The documents, written in English, are published by Göteborg university in the scientific serial Arbete och Hälsa. The documents are also available as pdf downloads via this website under Publications.

The decision to produce a document is mainly based on requests from the Nordic regulatory authorities. The availability of scientific data, recently published criteria documents and ongoing activities at the international level are also considered.

The responsibility of preparing a document is allocated to a scientist in one of the Nordic countries.

NEG has a bilateral co-operation with US NIOSH and the Dutch expert committee on occupational standards (DECOS).