The Modernet consortium, background and organization

Introduction: 
Occupational diseases still occur frequently and are responsible for a great deal of suffering and economic damage in countries all over the world. From a technical and a social perspective, working life is changing rapidly, creating new risk areas and requiring new management systems to control these risks. This changing pattern of occupational diseases implies the need to study the appropriateness of the present monitoring systems. Many registries are not suitable for tracing newly occurring occupational diseases. 

Methods: 
We composed a network of qualified centres in the field of epidemiology, monitoring and disseminating knowledge on occupational diseases.The scientific activities have been distributed among four Working Groups. 
WG 1: improvement of quality of data collection 
WG 2: application of new techniques and methods for analysis of trends 
WG 3: new techniques for tracing newly occurring occupational diseases 
WG4: dissemination and implementation of new knowledge on occupational diseases 

Results: 
A network of 16 European countries and Australia has been established. A kick off meeting was organized in November 2010, followed by meetings in Amsterdam in April 2011 and Manchester in November 2011. As a spinoff of the network a congress “Tracing new occupational diseases” has been organized in Amsterdam in April 2011. This congress yielded several leads for further investigation: 
1. cases of possible newly occurring occupational diseases 
2. methodological considerations on data quality and interpretation of trends 
3. methods for tracing new occupational risks 
4. innovative projects on monitoring occupational diseases and tracing new occupational risks 

Discussion: 
The network serves as a community for research on monitoring occupational diseases and tracing new occupational risks. International collaboration can provide signs of newly occurring occupational diseases and speed up the exchange of information and the distribution of this information to relevant stakeholders.