BfR
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Annual Report 2014
02
Foreword
Dear Readers,
Does the BfR do a good job? This is a question that everyone employed
at the institute has to answer through their activities and performance.
You are holding the Annual Report 2014 in your hands with a number of
selected examples which are intended to show you the fields of con-
sumer health protection in which the BfR is active and the contribution
the Institute makes towards improving consumer safety. But how can the
quality of the BfR's work be measured? The answers to this question
are as varied as the tasks the institute performs. One of the top priority
tasks of the BfR is political consulting, but when can it be regarded as
successful and what are the assessment criteria? The BfR pursued this
question in 2014 and in doing so launched several initiatives which have
the goal of defining verifiable criteria on which the institute will focus and
by which it can be measured. Other criteria serve to appraise scientific
performance in research, assessment and communication. All of these
preliminary tasks were taken into account in the evaluation made by the
Scientific Council at the beginning of May 2015.
Further confirmation of the quality of the work of the BfR is to be found
in the popularity of the events it organises. A good example of this is
the main theme of this leaflet: aluminium, which is used in cosmetics,
foods and packagings to name but a few examples. The BfR staged a
consumer protection forum, including an online dialogue forum, on the
question of whether or not this light metal poses any health risks, both of
which found broad acclaim in the media. This also applied to the event
staged to mark the occasion of the activation of the “AnimalTestInfo”
database by federal government minister Christian Schmidt. The web-
site informs about animal testing projects with the help of non-technical
project summaries.
The assumption of the tasks of the national committee in line with the
Animal Welfare Act was one of the most important elements of the BfR
in 2014. By doing so, the Centre for the Documentation and Assess-
ment of Alternative and Supplementary Methods to Animal Experiments
(ZEBET) can in future be expanded into a national competence centre
and the committee office set up to coordinate the tasks.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel, President
Prof. Dr. Reiner Wittkowski, Vice-President
