Editorial statement

In 2007 the editorial board of TBV, the Dutch journal of occupational and insurance medicine, decided to produce one international English issue a year.

There have been several reasons for this policy. International cooperation in our professions has become more intense, and of course the main language for the international scientific community has become English. We also know that professional communities still read in their local language, as we do here in the Netherlands and Belgium. However, studying international English articles has become almost inevitable e.g. in order to work ‘evidence based’. TBV is trying to bridge this gap by providing referates, summaries of international articles and – increasingly frequent – republications of major articles.