Legislative measures

This chapter will give an overview of recent international trends and initiatives regarding chemicals in leather and articles containing leather. That includes the identification of chemicals in the produced leather that are common on restricted substance lists and present ongoing recent initiatives to control the impact from these chemicals including both legislative measures and initiatives from customers such as international brands or purchasing sectors and different eco-labels. 

Protection of water sources is critical to economic viability as well as to human and environmental health. This has been evident for many decades, but just in the 1980s, the European Community started to adopt legislative measures to evaluate and preserve groundwater and also to implement bans on pesticides which at first concerned mainly persistent organochlorine compounds. Along the years, various European Community Directives have addressed these issues in the European Union, among them ... 

In spite of the legislative measures that have progressively been adopted, many different pesticide substances are detected in Europe s groundwater at levels sometimes greater than the Directive 2006/118/EC maximum allowable concentration, and the pesticides most commonly found in groundwater appear to be atrazine, simazine and lindane [3, 13]. 

The first issue to address is to sensitize and obtain the commitment of law-makers in order to introduce adequate legislative measures, in particular ... 

Core treaties, international cooperation and legislative measures... 

In view of prevention, it would be advisable to obtain legislative measures worldwide in order to limit the over-the-counter availability of all analgesics containing two analgesic components plus caffeine/codeine. This is formally asked in Europe [8] as well as in the United States [7] by a large group of investigators active in the field. 

Until the publication of the Decree-Law No. 72/91, the whole sector had been regulated by a set of clearly outdated rules, some of them from 1931. This fact, together with the need to adapt several community directives to national law, hcis Ccdled for appropriate legislative measures. 

Health promotion and disease prevention are oriented toward people. With disease prevention, the idea is to reduce the incidence of specific diseases by means of specific actions exercised by health professionals, generally within the framework of primary care, although they can also be applied in other areas (schools, factories, etc,). With health promotion, the idea is that people themselves should adopt favorable lifestyles and give up unhealthy habits through educational intervention (health education in schools, factories, primary care centers, and pharmacies, and via the mass media) and legislative measures. 

Over the last five years, most CEECs have attempted to counter the drug problem through institutional and legislative measures, demand-reduction activities (primarily prevention and treatment) and law enforcement. 

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