Article 31 Expert Group

The Commission never came forward with specific recommendations to the Council of Ministers meeting in early 1987. Instead, it decided to organise an international scientific discussion meeting on the subject in April 1987. At the same time, the Article 31 Expert Group reconsidered their recommendations and came forward with simplified limits. The Commission decided that even these were pitched at an unacceptably high level and advanced in support the disagreement on appropriate intervention levels which had become apparent at the April 1987 scientific discussion meeting. 

Temporary Intervention limits recommended by Article 31 Expert Group, May 1986, for ... 

On 30 May a Council Regulation laid down restrictions on the specific activity of milk, cheese and other foodstuffs imported into the Community, of 370 Bq/kg for milk, rising to 600 Bq/kg for cheese and other foodstuffs. This regulation was intended to deal specifically with foodstuff contamination by Cs-134 and Cs-137 and was stricter than recommendations to the European Commission by a Group of Experts set up under the provisions of the Euratom Treaty (the Article 31 Group ) (see Table 8.3). This was because the Council felt it should harmonise its regulations with those of countries outside the Community such as the USA, which had set similar limits. By agreement, member states accepted that trade in foodstuffs within the Community would abide by the same levels and that no state would set lower national levels. 

The three fundamental obligations are followed by thirteen articles, often referred to by the Expert Group as the "technical articles". These articles, 7 through 19, are based on a Safety Fundamentals document in the IAEA Safety Series The Safety of Nuclear Installations [1]. The Safety Fundamentals document contains a series of principles, each preceded by one or more paragraphs that provide background material and a discussion of the issues which give rise to the principle. The articles of the Convention include only the principles from the Safety Fundamentals document. 

The Expert Group left undefined a number of major topics. Principal among there are the form and content of national reports and the review process during meetings of Parties. These topics, and others, will be formally addressed when the Convention enters into force and a preparatory meeting is held in accordance with Article 21. Although formal prqiarations cannot start until the Convention enters into force a substantial amount of work has been done. 

Common technical specifications (CTS) are to be adopted by the Article 7.2 Committee (a working group of scientific experts appointed by the Member States) which will apply to devices in Annex II List A and, when required, devices in Annex II List B. There is some uncertainty about the circumstances in which the requirement might apply to List B devices. CTS establish appropriate performance evaluation and re-evaluation criteria, batch release criteria, reference methods, and reference materials. If, for duly justified reasons, manufacturers do not comply with the CTS, they must adopt other solutions which are at least equivalent to these specifications. CTS are intended mainly for the evaluation of the safety of the blood supply and organ donations. 

The strategies used in managing the adverse effects of oral morphine have been reassessed in another special article compiled by the Expert Working Group of the European Association of Palliative Care Network (5). Factors that predict opioid adverse effects include ... 

An ad hoc review group of the DHHS Working Group on Dental Amalgam examined 175 literature articles concerning mercury amalgam (DHHS, 1997). The articles represented an assortment of literature from peer-reviewed journals and a variety of other print media. None of the 12 expert reviewers... 

The predictive toxicology cluster provided a group of articles related to QSARs [45], bioinformatics [46], and expert systems [47]. Pharmacokinetic data acquisition and interpretation have been heavily intertwined with computation since the early days of the discipline. This hasn t changed with the more current field of toxicokinetics. 

Goldman, Erik L. New DASH Findings Push for Lower Sodium Intake. Family Practice News 30 (2000) 13. International Medical News Group. This article describes why some hypertension experts recommend minimizing sodium in food. 

A very helpful procedure was that the Group of Experts considered each of the Articles of the Chapter on Obligations of the Nuclear Safety Convention to see whether there were some that could be readily transferred to a Convention on Radioactive Waste Management Safety or where some, analogy could be found, and where there were articles specific to Nuclear Safety that had no ready analogue in Radioactive Waste Management Safety. 

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