80th National SIMLII Conference

The Padua School of Occupational Medicine has the pleasure and the honour of inviting all those who are interested to participate in the 80^th National Conference of the Italian Society of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, to be held in Padua from 20^th to 22^nd September 2017 in Pavilions 7 and 8 at PadovaFiere. The National SIMLII Conference returns to Padua 36 years after the 44^th edition, held in 1981 on the occasion of the 70^th birthday of Prof. Massimo Crepet. The Padua branch subsequently organised the 56^th National Conference in Venice in 1993, tackling the topic "Risk assessment and defining limit values ​​for chemical agents". This issue has been the subject of much discussion since, and we want to take stock after more than 20 years by proposing "The guiding values ​​of risk assessment" as the main theme of the 80^th Conference. Another main theme will be "Allergies and work", a subject dear to our branch since Padua is home to one of the first Graduate Schools of Allergology, directed first by Prof. Crepet and then by another unforgettable teacher, Prof. Bruno Saia. We will then examine two other topics of great interest for the discipline, which occupational physicians will have to tackle increasingly often in the near future: "Gender in occupational medicine" and "Ageing and work".

The Conference, preceded as per tradition on the morning of 20^th September by the pre-conference refresher

courses on specific topics, will be divided into 5 plenary sessions on the main Conference topics, one of which will be dedicated to viewing and discussing the posters, and into numerous parallel sessions dedicated to debating other specific topics and to open discussions, to illustrating SIMLII's Work Group Guidelines, and to the contribution of sections of SIMLII and other scientific societies. The guiding phrase of the 80^th Conference, "Occupational Medicine from research to practice", brings back the historical axiom uttered by Galileo Galilei, one of our university's most prestigious alumni: "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so". In line with this, the lecture of the inaugural session has been entrusted to Prof. Gaetano Thiene, a distinguished anatomical pathologist from our university, an internationally renowned scholar in the field of heart disease and also a passionate historian of the development of medicine in Padua. His address is titled "Origin of the Scientific Method and Modern Medicine at the University of Padua in the 16^th-18^th Century".