**4. Conclusions**

The recent and massive migration of populations of various ethnicities in the European countries and the global climate changes not only are affecting the human social life and behaviors but represent also a serious health and safety concern for the population. Any individual response to the environmental and occupational exposure is dependent on different factors; one of the most important and obvious is related to the personal genetic background characterizing different population groups. However many other exogenous factors such as the individual lifestyle, the smoking habit, the use of drugs, the type of diet and the ubiquitous presence of toxicants are factors affecting the individual genetic heritage. A novel and effective approach to the management of the public health risk is urgently needed. Although the genetic information is correctly used in the occupational risk assessment models, various ethical and social issues may arise when dealing with gene polymorphisms at workplace, particularly when the labour force is heterogeneous. The possible reluctance of immigrants and of local workers to give the consent to the biosample donation, the expenses sustained by the laboratory for the analysis as well as the necessity of approvals by the health unit and the manufacturing company to allow the investigational study do not facilitate the success of the biomonitoring campaign which, if not mandatory as the health surveillance, is still important to assess and quantify the exposure to hazardous substances and the susceptibility risk at workplace. Nonetheless the worker misinterpretation or the miscommunication of genetic susceptibility and vulnerability concepts might be misunderstood and considered as personal weakness or inability to perform a specific job task. This erroneous interpretation of susceptibility should be transferred to the workers in a clear and correct form so as they know the individual variability, regardless of the difference in genetic heritage, is not a negative aspect but should be conceived as a personal trait. The role of genotyping in the occupational exposure, no matter if it is carried out in a laboratory or by a statistical analysis, is to define a susceptibility risk for the investigated ethnic group. This information will be useful to take into account the difference between ethnicities so as to verify the company OELs are safe or need to be adjusted taking into account different susceptibilities. In the absence of blood sample or consent from the worker to donation, the availability of a statistical predictive model, based on the genotype publicly available on web databases, should be necessarily regarded as useful indicator of the probable subject's genotype of the ethnic group to which the individual belongs to. Even though the access to genotyping is not possible, a certain number of advantages might be achieved: reduction of the laboratory costs for the research institute, no need of informed consent from workers and no need of trained staff and

**77**

**Author details**

Pieranna Chiarella\*, Pasquale Capone and Renata Sisto\*

Center of Monteporzio Catone, Rome, Italy

provided the original work is properly cited.

Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Epidemiology and Hygiene, INAIL–Italian National Workers', Compensation Authority, Research

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*Address all correspondence to: p.chiarella@inail.it and r.sisto@inail.it

*The Role of Genetic Polymorphisms in the Occupational Exposure*

the individual health protection and safety in the workplace [35].

laboratory equipment for blood collection and therefore no venipuncture, which means no harm to the worker. The predictive model mentioned here may represent a potential but also amendable alternative to the laboratory genotyping of workers and might involve the study of other ethnic groups. However keeping updated these databases will be useful not only to better characterize all the ethnic groups' genotypes but also to manage the novel susceptibility risks that might compromise

The authors thank all the colleagues of our institute with whom we collaborated to the biomonitoring investigational studies. No fundings have been used to write

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86975*

**Acknowledgements**

**Conflict of interests**

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

this chapter.

*The Role of Genetic Polymorphisms in the Occupational Exposure DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86975*

laboratory equipment for blood collection and therefore no venipuncture, which means no harm to the worker. The predictive model mentioned here may represent a potential but also amendable alternative to the laboratory genotyping of workers and might involve the study of other ethnic groups. However keeping updated these databases will be useful not only to better characterize all the ethnic groups' genotypes but also to manage the novel susceptibility risks that might compromise the individual health protection and safety in the workplace [35].
