RIVM has been safeguarding and promoting public health and environmental quality in the Netherlands for over a 100 years. This brochure provides an overview of our activities.

Rolina van Gaalen studies the safety of pharmaceutical products (vaccines and drugs), and is interested in the accurate statistical modeling of exposures to these products. Her research focuses on the relationship between (1) individual- and population-level, time-varying antibiotic use and (2) the time to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Of particular interest is whether certain dosing regimens and drug combinations are more strongly associated with the emergence of resistance than others. Rolina’s broad background and interest in other modeling techniques, such as Bayesian statistics, has lead to her involvement in projects on influenza and outbreak detection using genotypic and spatial data.

SimpleBox is a multimedia mass balance model of the so-called ‘Mackay type’. It simulates environmental fate of chemicals as fluxes (mass flows) between a series of well-mixed boxes of air, water, sediment and soil on regional, continental and global spatial scales.

Statistical Program to Assess Dietary Exposure (SPADE) estimates the habitual intake distribution for daily and episodically consumed foods or dietary components based on information of intake, measured on a limited number of days (e.g. 24 hr recalls) and sometimes in combination with a questionnaire (e.g. food frequency questionnaires).

If you would like further information, or if you have any comments about SPADE, send an e-mail to SPADE@rivm.nl.

Stated below are the most frequently asked questions. If your question is not on this list you can always contact us on SPADE@rivm.nl.

SPADE is implemented in a freely available, open-source software for statistical computing. Here you can find all available files and documentation.

All news about spade is disseminated by e-mail